Recording of the week: a Mute Swan’s heart

This week’s selection comes from Greg Green, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. There are hundreds of thousands of recordings of birds in the sound archive, but not all are of the typical songs and calls we would expect. I have come across recordings of wingbeats (swans, pigeons,…

Make yourself at home! The BBC in a multi-cultural world

David Hendy writes about an upcoming event at the British Library, Britain Reimagined: A New Oral History of the BBC.

London dialect in pop music

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Spoken English writes: The mixed reception among my children and their peers to Arctic Monkeys’ sixth studio album, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, is, I suspect, the equivalent of my Kid A moment. I’m probably not qualified to contribute to the debate on the album’s…

Recording of the week: the orchestral power of embroidery machines

This week’s selection comes from Lucia Cavorsi, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Serious/Speakout was a UK promotion company to which artists submitted their demo tapes when seeking performance opportunities during the 1990s. This particular recording features an excerpt of Concerto for Percussion and Embroidery Machine. It world…

The voice of Jack Johnson – heavyweight boxing champion of the world

By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Jack Johnson c.1908 The legendary Jack Johnson (1878-1946) is remembered as the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, a title he held from 1908 to 1915. At a time when race relations were extremely volatile in the United States, Johnson caused a sensation…