The British Library is planning to enhance its sound and moving image services to users. From today we are undertaking a survey to find out more about users’ current use of sound and moving images and what sort of a service you would expect from the British Library. Answers to the survey will help inform future developments at the Library. The survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete (and we're just as interested in responses from non BL members).…

The British Library is looking for someone to provide technical support for its Opening up Speech Archives project, which is investigating the potential of speech-to-text technologies for research.

The Technical Analyst is required to manage the technical aspects of the project: researching the available solutions and applications that fit the Library’s technical environment, evaluating test content processed by different suppliers, overseeing the indexing of up to 6,000 hours of…

Launched by Folkestone Fringe, Boat Radio is a new commissioning platform for transmission-based sound works on digital radio, following performance duo Lone Twin's boat 'Collective Spirit' as she travels the south east coastline.

http://www.transmissioncommission.com/index.html

I thought folks might be interested in a tool we are using at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. It's the Sonnox Fraunhofer ProCodec. One of the ways we are using it is to demonstrate to researchers and the general public alike what the affects of a lossy codec like mp3 will have on their natural sound recordings.

Here's the link to the article in a recent AES publication.…

New podcast: VARIATIONS #7. The composer, by Jon Leidecker

Link: http://bit.ly/MGcw1s

MP3: http://bit.ly/LPTaEi

Playlist+related info: http://bit.ly/Lhp6SQ

Transcript: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/20120704/07Variations_transcript_eng.pdf

Led by Jon Leidecker, VARIATIONS…

The Wall of Death is a motorcycle stunt which was first performed in Britain at Southend in 1929.

It uses a wooden barrel-like structure perhaps 30 feet/10 meters or more in diameter. The top is open to allow spectators to watch the action inside as motorcyclists circle and pick up enough speed to ride along the walls at right angles to the ground.…

The past three months in UK have been the wettest since records began in 1910, but it's not the only place experiencing foul weather. Here's an impressive recording from Ray Mansell in New York state of a thunderstorm over his home last Monday (warning: loud strike at 3'50" and after):

Ray wrote on the nature recordists list: "As it happens, the storm tracked directly over the house, and I got rather more than I had bargained for. Even though I had set the recording…

An early record catalogue, from 1916: "His Master's Voice, New Records of Dance Music - All Suitable for Jazzing".

http://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/TEXTS/029I-HMVDX1916XXX-0000A0.pdf

Perhaps this may interest colleagues; on Saturday 30 June, 9.40pm UK time, I'm involved in an edition of BBC Radio 3's 'Between the Ears' about the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo and his famous poem, 'Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again'. It's an impressionistic feature full of Chinese voices speaking Xu's words and reflecting on them, blending with the rippling of the River Cam. It's produced by Andy Cartwright of Soundscape Productions. More information here:…

Alan Dower Blumlein (1903-1942) was a prolific inventor and innovator of technology and was involved in projects as diverse as the development of radar and sound recording. In 1933 he developed his ideas on recording audio in stereo and the rest, as is often said, is history....

Listen to his experiments on the British Library Sounds website here:…

It is not every day when I am free from traffic noise. But when it happens it is possible to notice other small sounds in the surroundings.

That happened in beginning of June 2012 when I was at Krossholt at Barðastönd, in the northwest of…

Indiana University researcher Patrick Feaster explains the tools and techniques used to extract early sound recordings from pictures in 19th Century journals.

http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/…

An interesting article and video published yesterday on the BBC's website, "Music evolution: Is this the end of the composer?", describes another attempt to create music by machine, starting with random computer noises, then subjecting them to 'Darwinian' forces: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18449939

The article implies that machines are the driving force behind this creativity. The stages…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18442081

For those of you interested, I have just updated the record and ride website with some nice German poetry and a band of origins as diverse as Australian/Polish, German and Canadian: http://record-and-ride.com/

Also, I am now in Warsaw and will be heading down to Krakow, Prague, Vienna then Croatia. If anyone is from there or knows anyone interested in sound or music, it would be great to get in contact!
Ciao.

Time Passes, a new work by JD Lopez (Australia) and Luis Antero (Portugal), has been released as a free download on Green Field Recordings.

Time Passes explores the way in which natural sounds mark the movement of the sun from morning till night. Field recordings weave around guitar work, with each track signalling the passing of time as heard in the sub-tropical…

The British Library has just launched a new blog about music, at http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/music. It will feature news and information about the Library's music collections, events and services, covering music of all types and in all formats, from manuscripts to MP3s.

The Sonic Arts Research Centre is looking to appoint a full time, permanent member of academic staff with a background in Electrical and Electronic Engineering or Computer Science. This position is an opportunity to contribute to the interdisciplinary research team at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, School of Creative Arts, Queen's University Belfast.

The aim of this post is to produce high-quality research and publications and to undertake undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in…

Shellachead is a new site for early world music recordings. It includes notes, image of the label, and the recordings.
http://shellachead.com/

The site is done by the same person as runs the Haji Maji site, which concerns itself with shellac from Asia.
http://hajimaji.wordpress.com/

(Thanks to my colleague, James Tugwell, for introducing me to these sites.)