Enhancing discovery of the British Library’s audio collections Richard Ranft 23 June 2014 Making Metadata Work ISKO UK + IRSG + DCMI joint meeting Discovering the British Library’s audio collections • the collections • discovery and access • improving discovery and access www.bl.uk 2 The British Library’s audio collections • established 1955 (as British Institute of Recorded Sound) • national collection of UK record industry • selected publications from overseas • radio broadcasts • unpublished recordings www.bl.uk 3 Subjects • music • spoken word • environments & nature www.bl.uk 4 Extent • 8 million tracks • from 1857 to this morning • many formats • total 115 years of listening www.bl.uk 5 Barriers to access • copyrights • many non-digital tracks • offline digital • time-based = time consuming • limited, text-based search • no serendipity • high expectations (c.f. iTunes, Spotify) www.bl.uk 6 • ‘opacity’ of audio (no freezeframes!) Current access • Sound & Moving Image Catalogue: sami.bl.uk • onsite listening: – Listening & Viewing Service – SoundServer (200,000 tracks, 2.5% of collections) • off site listening: – BL Sounds (50,000 tracks, 0.6%) • streaming • downloading www.bl.uk 8 Sound & Moving Image Catalogue sami.bl.uk www.bl.uk 9 Existing web services Human-led enrichment • description • transcription • annotation • category tagging • rating • recommendation & review www.bl.uk 11 Machine enrichment/search Categorisation Music genre, language/dialect detection, mood Synchronisation Score following Transcript following Identification Speaker/vocalist ID Melody recognition Query by humming/tapping Non-text browsing Map browse Timeline browse Recommendation & matching melody matching Cross-media linking Speaker/ tune matching Feature extraction Pitch, tempo, chord, time signature, rhythm Segmentation/event detection Music/speech segments Speaker/ lead instrument change Laughter, applause, emotion detection Transcription Speech-to-text Score generation Click to add title  Bullet 1 – Bullet2 • Bullet 3 13 Click to add title  Bullet 1 – Bullet2 • Bullet 3 14 BL Sounds • Improving access and discovery • http://sounds.bl.uk/ Visualisation and analysis • Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM) http://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/ • Powered by Telemeta http://telemeta.org/ Current projects • work with Metable and record labels to acquire and describe digital music • search via APIs across open music databases such as MusicBrainz, Decibel, Discogs • COMMA: cloud-based media analysis project with BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/comma www.bl.uk 23 Example http://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Earlyspoken-word-recordings/024M-1CS0011556XX-0200V0 English Conversation: At the Tobacconist's (1929) Linguaphone 78rpm www.bl.uk 26 Thanks for listening! richard.ranft@bl.uk www.bl.uk 28