Recording of the week: Trude Levi and Holocaust liberation

This week’s selection comes from Charlie Morgan, Oral History Archivist. Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The National Life Stories oral history project ‘Living Memory of the Jewish Community’ includes many Holocaust survivors describing their experience of Auschwitz…




Recording of the week: night in a várzea forest by boat

This week’s selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. Rainforests are noisy places, even after dark. This recording was made in one of the Amazon’s many várzea or floodplain forests, in the dead of night, by wildlife sound recordist Ian Christopher Todd. Based in a boat…




A Life Lived and Seen: a tribute to Anna Teasdale

Hester Westley pays tribute to Anna Teasdale who she interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.




Recording of the week: Pinglish code-switching

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Adam Cohn Many bilingual speakers demonstrate a fascinating tendency to code-switch – that is they alternate between different languages as circumstance dictates, generally subconsciously and often within the same utterance. Listen to Code Switching (BL…




Recording of the week: why you should listen to the common eider duck

This week’s selection comes from Eve-Marie Oesterlen, Lead Metadata Manager for the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. As Lead Metadata Manager for the Unlocking Our Sound project I have less time than I would like to listen to the sonic treasures we retrieve from the vaults. One of my guilty pleasures,…