Enhancing discovery of the British Library’s audio collections Richard Ranft 23 June 2014 Making Metadata Work ISKO UK + IRSG + DCMI joint meeting

2 Discovering the British Library’s audio collections the collections discovery and access improving discovery and access

3 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of Recorded Sound) national collection of UK record industry selected publications from overseas radio broadcasts unpublished recordings

4 Subjects music spoken word environments & nature

5 Extent 8 million tracks from 1857 to this morning many formats total 115 years of listening

6 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)

‘opacity’ of audio (no freeze- frames!)

8 Current access Sound & Moving Image Catalogue: sami.bl.uksami.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

9 Sound & Moving Image Catalogue sami.bl.uk sami.bl.uk

Existing web services

11 Human-led enrichment description transcription annotation category tagging rating recommendation & review

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

13 Click to add title Bullet 1 –Bullet2 Bullet 3

14 Click to add title Bullet 1 –Bullet2 Bullet 3

BL Sounds

Improving access and discovery

Visualisation and analysis

Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (CREM) Powered by Telemeta

23 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

26 Example spoken-word-recordings/024M-1CS XX-0200V0 spoken-word-recordings/024M-1CS XX-0200V0 English Conversation: At the Tobacconist's (1929) Linguaphone 78rpm

28 Thanks for listening!