ORAL RECORDINGS.

A couple of links to the kind of projects I like to see:

1) Native American Audio Collections: “The APS is currently in the process of digitizing and extensively cataloging over 3000 hours of endangered Native American languages. These recordings include music, origin stories, historical accounts, linguistic material, and conversations with elders in both English and indigenous languages.” Thanks, Leslie! [Apr. 2023: See now the Native American Audio Collection at the Ethnic Studies Library of UC Berkeley.]

2) Tobar an Dualchais: “This website contains over 26,000 oral recordings made in Scotland and further afield, from the 1930s onwards. The items you can listen to include stories, songs, music, poetry and factual information.”

Comments

  1. Thanks for posting this. Ever since reading James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (also on your recommendation), I’ve been curious about what Scots actually sounds like. I clicked on the “Examples from the Collection” tab, and got to listen to Belle Stewart singing in cant. I had no idea it survived so long. I’ll be playing around with this website for a while.

  2. One wonders why the American Indian recordings are hosted by the American Philosophical Society.

  3. The American Philosophical Society has been around since 1743, when philosophy still had its traditional breadth of meaning. It is the oldest learned society in the U.S. — older than the U.S. itself, indeed, and concerns itself with both the humanities and the natural sciences.

  4. Well there you have it.

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