This week we visited the Sound Archive held at the British Library. Once we all arrived at the British Museum we were taken to a room with a presentation prepared for us. The presentation took us through recording and sound formats throughout history. From Wax Cylinders to magnetic tape, to minidisc, to digital we were told about the creation of these devices and how they were used. Our presenter had a table full of these sound devices, they had wax cylinders, reel-to-reel tapes, minidiscs and cassette tapes.
Throughout the presentation, he showed us how these devices on the table worked or showed us a piece of equipment that matches what the presentation was showing us at that time. For example, we were shown what a blank unrecorded wax cylinder looks like, and how the grooves would be formed when recorded onto the cylinder.
The presentation went in order of time, so we went from the very first recording device which was the phonautograph, the phonautograph was created in 1857. This device has a cone and a diaphragm, the cone would take in the vibrations and with the differing air pressure would move the stylus and diaphragm of the phonautograph. The soundwaves would be scratched onto paper by the needle, and the paper was coated in soot to make the sound waves readable.
My personal favourite time period was the tape era, which began in 1935. I work a lot with tape, in particular cassettes and tape loops in my own work so this piqued my interest. Our presenter ran through reel-to-reel tape, which is something I have never worked with, and they also had reel-to-reel tape that we could hold at the end of the presentation. We were taught that some of these reel-to-reel tapes were made with different materials, which has caused a lot of these tapes to deteriorate over the years. This is also affected by the conditions you store your tape in. This tape deterioration can be used to an artist’s advantage, with William Basinski doing this with his Disintegration Loops series. In which he records a slowly decaying reel-to-reel loop.
He also talked about cassettes and the invention of the PCM Betamax/VHS which were also on the table. This was really fascinating to see the progression from reel-to-reel tapes in 1935 to having a portable cassette tape that you can listen to in either a stereo sound system or walkman (which were not invented till 1979 by Sony).
After the presentation half of us went down into the archives and the other half stayed upstairs, I stayed upstairs and got to have a more in-detail look at the equipment but I had to leave before I could visit the archive downstairs which is a shame. Being able to actually hold the equipment was an incredible experience. Our presenter let us pick up the equipment and look at it, he was talking us through some of the equipment in more detail and answered any questions we had.
Our presenter walked us through some other sound recordings and showed us some work created by the author William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was a famous author and artist who was famous for his nonlinear, postmodern, and surreal works of writing that talk about a wide array of ideas and subjects, like sexuality and drugs. His work is very polarising and experimental, it also is semi semiautobiographical as he struggled with Heroin addiction for years, this was also during his writing process. During the 1960s Burroughs lived in London moving in and out of hotels and still struggling with his Heroin addiction. He recorded a variety of reel-to-reel experiments which were played for us, these recordings consisted of vocal manipulation and feedback. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching Burroughs as a sound artist and found he had some sound releases under his belt.
One of these works is being curated alongside Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle fame. The album Nothing Here Now But The Recordings is compiled of Field Recordings, heavily edited vocal passages and throat recordings which are mixed together in a very jarring and unsettling way by P-Orridge and Christopherson. I wouldn’t have learnt any of this if it weren’t for the presentation so I am very thankful for this trip and all the valuable information I learnt.