Exploring a million hours of sounds Richard Ranft, The British
Library 27 November 2014 Search Solutions 2014
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www.bl.uk 2 the British Librarys audio collections discovery
and access finding one in a million Outline
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www.bl.uk 3 The British Librarys audio collections originated
in 1955 national collection of UK record industry selected
publications from overseas radio broadcasts unpublished
recordings
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www.bl.uk 4 Subjects music spoken word environments &
nature
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www.bl.uk 5 Extent 6 million tracks from 1857 to this morning
many formats 115 years of listening
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www.bl.uk 6 Obstacles to exploring and access copyrights
analogue or offline digital many non-digital tracks time-based =
time consuming limited, text-based search no serendipity high
expectations (c.f. iTunes, Spotify)
Improving access and discovery http://sounds.bl.uk/
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Visualisation and analysis
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www.bl.uk 21 Current BL projects Metable software: acquire /
describe UKs digital music, searching via APIs across open music
databases (MusicBrainz, Decibel, Discogs) COMMA: cloud-based media
analysis project with BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/comma
Digital Music Lab: analysing and visualising big music data
collections http://dml.city.ac.uk/
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www.bl.uk 22 Digital Music Lab example Chord detection using
Chordino VAMP Plugin (Queen Mary University of London)
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www.bl.uk 23 English conversation: At the Tobacconist's (1929)
Linguaphone 78rpm shellac disc
http://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Early-
spoken-word-recordings/024M-1CS0011556XX-0200V0
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www.bl.uk 25 Thanks for listening! [email protected]
http://sounds.bl.uk @soundarchive
