The British Library Archive of Recorded Sound

It's been a while since the last post, and I'm slowly going to try to blog more.

Yesterday I was reading about major updates to the online sound archives of the British Library. This is an amazing collection. Access to the collections varies according to geographic location; more files are available to residents of the United Kingdom, and even more to those who are associated with a UK institution of higher learning. Over 23,000 sound files are available to everyone.

The archive includes spoken word and musical recordings, and includes both field and commercial recordings. The files can't be embedded, so links are provided instead.

My favorite part of the collection is the archive of world and traditional music. Of particular interest are 952 recordings from Decca's West Africa yellow label series. These are commercial recordings, made between 1948 and 1958, and include many rare performances that are unavailable elsewhere.

Here are Adeolu and his Rio Lindo Orchestra from this series:

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-1CS0043775XX-0100V0.xml

The archive also contains 244 ethnographic wax cylinder recordings, made between 1898 and 1919. The sound quality is poor, but they are well worth hearing.

Here is the beautiful and disturbing "Death Wail", recorded in 1898 during the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, which is located between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-C0080X1104XX-0100V0.xml

Mr. Seagalman calls horses, cows, sheep, and fowl. (UK, 1910)

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=025M-C0037X1639XX-0100V0.xml

This is the blog for the Sound Archive, which features a Recording of the Week.

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/archival_sounds/


The archive also contains a collection of regional sounds and dialects from many locations in England, This recordings are interesting not only for their preservation of dialects, but because they are also oral histories, and provide a record of a way of life that no longer exists.

A resident of Cheshire discusses traveling through the area with his threshing machine. This was recorded in 1966. The speaker was 76 at that time.

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0908X0011XX-0300V0.xml

Monkeys. language, and learning

I've always been interested in studies that evaluate the ability of non-human primates to learn the basics of language. I'll write about the use of sign language by Koko the Gorilla at some point, but for now I'm going to focus on a study which demonstrated that cotton-top tamarind monkeys can learn the basic affixation rule (the proper use of suffixes and prefixes).

It's important to clearly state what the researchers believe that this study. has shown. It's doesn't show that the monkeys have linguistic capabilities such as understanding the rules of grammar, but that they possess an ability to understand patterns of temporal ordering.

The monkeys in the study were familiarized with a syllable that, depending on the group, was consistently used as a suffix or a prefix. In this study the syllable"shoy"was used as the affix syllable during the familiarization stage, and a group of two letter stem syllables such as "be" " ba" and "pu"were also used. there. For example,words for the prefix group would be shoy-be and shoy-ba, and be-shoy and ba-shoy for the suffix group. There was no formal training process, nor were rewards given

During the test phase of the study one syllable words such as wasp and swan were used instead of the nonsense syllables. When the temporal order of the words was switched (i.e. be-shoy instead of shoy-be) the monkeys acted surprised, based on a change in head orientation. The researchers concluded that the monkeys possessed a psychological mechanism for learning and memory that allowed them to determine affixation patterns,but couldn't' link them to syntax, semantics, and linguistic elements as humans can.

The results on this study relate to another important issue to me: the misreporting and and exaggerations that often happen when the press reports on advances in science. An excellent post on the "Motivated Grammar" blog summarizes the results of this study, then discusses a BBC article on it entitled "Monkeys recognize 'bad grammar". That's not what they are doing though - they are demonstrating an ability to learn temporal ordering patterns.

The article also contains a link to the draft of the original research paper.

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/quotes-and-grammar-monkeys-at-the-bbc/

Here's the abstract of the article:

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/07/08/rsbl.2009.0445.abstract?maxtoshow=&HITS=1&hits=1&RESULTFORMAT=&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=%2522evolution+of+language%2522&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&usestrictdates=yes&resourcetype=HWCIT&ct

The BBC article on the study:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8139322.stm

Here's another interesting article:

http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/2009/07/shboy-shboy.html