Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing.
Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing. How did they experience the world through sound? What did they themselves sound like, their voices, their accents? The aural experience of the past is lost to us. Now, though, we have the technology to record just about anything we want.
A huge new department at the British Library in St Pancras (the revamped National Sound Archive) is dedicated not just to preserving the very first tinfoil recordings of the philosopher Carl Jung giving a lecture, or the now extinct oo-oo aa-aa bird from Hawaii. Curators of radio, of aural history, of pop music and classical music, of the natural world and regional accents are also busy taking soundbites of contemporary life so that 150 years from now we’ll be able to hear the fleeting sound of a self-service supermarket checkout or the changing ways in which we pronounce the word ‘bathroom’.
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