In 1930, a 17-year-old boy called Patrick Saul walked into a music shop in London in search of a particular recording of a violin sonata by the Hungarian composer Dohnányi. It was no longer on sale, and Saul moved swiftly on to the British Museum, in the hope that he would at least be able to listen to the record there. On arrival, he was told that the museum held no gramophone records. Later in life, after founding the National Sound Archive, Saul would describe the sensation of realising that the record was completely lost as “feeling like a child hearing about death for the first time”.
After time spent working in a bank and studying, and several years haranguing wealthy donors, Saul opened the Institute of Recorded Sound (as it was first called) in 1955. Many decades, grants and buildings later, it’s now the British Library Sound Archive, home to more than seven million recordings of all kinds. Housed in a nondescript part of the British Library in London, recordings are preserved on every format from wax cylinders to WAV files. Clips date back to the beginning of recorded sound and range from an oral history of jazz in Britain to the call of the Bolivian earthcreeper bird.
In the years since its inception, the archive has expanded what it preserves, including global music and radio broadcasts, interviews with famous cultural figures and even sound maps, where people can upload recordings of themselves speaking with their own regional accents to the Sound Archive’s website.
Preserving the sounds of the past and present for future generations is a Herculean task, and audio recordings aren’t viewed as historical artefacts in the same way that photos and letters often are. So what does history sound like? And how do you choose which sounds are worthy of record?
Emily Thompson, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2005 and author of The Soundscape of Modernity in 2002 (which is widely credited with launching the field of sound studies), emphasises that using sound as a lens to view history can give us particular insights. In 2013, she created a website called the Roaring Twenties – an interactive map of noise complaints in New York City from 1926 to 1932. In an introduction to the website, Thompson explained that her aim went beyond simply presenting the sounds to a new audience. “The goal is to recover the meaning of sound, to undertake a historicised mode of listening that tunes our modern ears to the pitch of the past.”