The CNRS Sound Archives provided to the European Library through Europeana Sounds

IASA is pleased to highlight some of the presentations from this year's annual conference in Berlin. The following summary comes to us from Françoise Acquier, Henri Chamoux, Aude Da Cruz Lima, Veronique Ginouvès, Thomas Henry, and Joséphine Simonnot.

The CNRS Sound Archives provided to the European Library through Europeana Sounds. 

The audio archives recorded in the field of scientific research are scarcely accessible online. They raise several ethical and legal questions, as well as those about the relationships between different types of archives and the diversification of metadata formats. Through the Europeana Sounds project, for the first time, four research teams from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) worked together with sound archives to build a new network of resources and skills:

  • The Research Center for Ethnomusicology (CREM)
  • Sound archive of the Mediterranean Social Science Center (MMSH)
  • The Phonobase of the Historical Research Laboratory of Rhône-Alpes Region (LARHRA)
  • The Center for Research on Sound Spaces and Urban Environments (CRESSON), a research unit in architecture and urbanism.

Europeana sounds was a great opportunity to work with 24 European partners; to discover other data, many stakeholders, and share a common concern for sound archives; and to make more audio items accessible on Europeana through a specific sound channel addressed to a wide audience. Important work has also been undertaken collectively to clarify rights agreements.

Our four laboratories gathered together more than 38,000 sounds recorded from 1900 to the present day. These are now aggregated using the European Data Model for Sound (EDMS) on the Europeana website. A great diversity of origin and period ensures an interesting complementarity of the sound content coming from the research teams in France. Some of the contents are newly available online. To provide free access to the collections, the CNRS focused on the digitization of recordings made before 1963. The archiving process and the enrichment of metadata has progressed unexpectedly thanks to this project.

Other contents already online are also made more visible through this project, where all digital objects are engaged in a process of enrichment thanks to the new connections to other data created by the common portal. 

Shellac record, Musée de l’Homme label, Africa Vox license, IFAN mission, 1952. Photo : Henri Chamoux

Shellac record, Musée de l’Homme label, Africa Vox license, IFAN mission, 1952. Photo : Henri Chamoux

The CNRS – Musée de l’Homme Sound Archives offers access to published and unpublished recordings of music from all over the world, collected from the 1900s through the present day. Today this heritage represents more than 5,000 hours of traditional music. The Europeana Sounds project boosted our archiving process: today 21,000 items are available online for free access, and are aggregated on Europeana.

The visibility of these collections increased, too, with 11% of visitors coming from the Europeana portal. To increase visibility, we also participated in special events and published blogs to share information about the contents. For instance, the Music Channel Curation offers the opportunity to design a virtual exhibition about the  Ogooue Congo Mission 70 years after this important scientific event.

The collections in the Sound archives of the Mediterranean Social Science Center (MMSH) are field recordings in the domains of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, political sciences, history, music, and literature, all focused on the Mediterranean area. The collection held more than 7,000 hours of audio archives. The audio collections have been digitized since January 2000 and include 6,000 hours of recordings, listed in an online catalogue. 4,500 sound recordings are now aggregated in Europeana in accordance with ethical and legal questions.  The MMSH participates in the debates about the ethical and legal issues surrounding research data in Europeana.

Training to collect and to archive in Alger, 2017. Photo: V. Ginouvès

Training to collect and to archive in Alger, 2017. Photo: V. Ginouvès

The Phonobase of the Historical Research Laboratory of Rhône-Alpes Region (LARHRA) gathers soundtracks and photos taken from early private and commercial cylinders and records made from 1888 to 1920, approximately, and distributed in France and Europe. To-date it gives free access to 10,000 sound carriers, for a total of 500 hours.

Pathé cylinder : Soupé des vélos, sung by Dranem (Armand Ménard), n°2916 (1904). Photo : Henri Chamoux

Pathé cylinder : Soupé des vélos, sung by Dranem (Armand Ménard), n°2916 (1904). Photo : Henri Chamoux

Most of the sources are from private collections as they were not subjected to any legal deposit, which became effective in France in 1947. Phonobase was also made possible thanks to a device, the Archeophone phonograph, www.archeophone.org, which plays all types of cylinders. A remarkable feature offered by Europeana Sounds is Europeana Radio. This excellent tool allows for random discovery of the  sounds aggregated by Europeana.

The Center for Research on Sound Spaces and Urban Environments (CRESSON) is a research laboratory in architecture and urbanism, attached to the CNRS unit “Ambiances Architectures and Urbanities.”

Since 1980, the sonic space has been the central theme in the Center. CRESSON’s researchers recorded and analyzed everyday sounds related to the architecture and the city, representing a total of 60 hours published through an online catalogue and a sound map. The recordings are enriched with metadata and illustrations, photos, or geographic information in Cartophonies.

900 recordings posted on Europeana Sounds are available online under Creative Commons licenses. This opening for reuse is a good side effect of our work with Europeana Sounds. CRESSON sound recordings represent 20% of the “Environment sound recordings” on Europeana Sounds and bring a complementarity to the ethnographic and musicological contributions of our main CNRS partners.

Hengameh Pirhosseinloo, recording and measure at Grenoble, France, Esquis’sons project, 2014. Photo : CRESSON

Hengameh Pirhosseinloo, recording and measure at Grenoble, France, Esquis’sons project, 2014. Photo : CRESSON

The Europeana Sounds project promoted new methods and tools to share, allowing a better dissemination of CNRS audio contents. It was an opportunity for us to develop new skills: we joined a large European network of experts among twelve (12) countries and practiced the management of a European project, which is really challenging for small research units. It was also our first occasion to debate about ethical and legal issues with foreign institutions and to cope with data multilingualism.

We tried new ways to enrich metadata by data linking on the web: we used the tool WITH, a collaborative platform in Europeana Sounds Space with Pundit, an alignment tool, to be able to link to a multilingual thesaurus of musical instruments MIMO. We participated together in creating many blog posts, and Europeana helps to broadcast this information about our data to a wide public in Europe.

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