What Essex sounds like: soft launch of Essex Sounds audio map

For the past six months, the You Are Hear project team at the Essex Sound and Video Archive has been asking you what Essex sounds like. Whether stopping innocent passers-by in shopping centres, appealing to the public through newspapers, or calling for suggestions through e-bulletins, we have been asking you what noises you hear in your daily routine, what noises you associate with the county, what sounds represent your community.

Now we have the answer! Well, to a point. We have compiled the results with our Sound Recordist, Stuart Bowditch. Based on your suggestions, he has been venturing into the far corners of the county, braving all weathers, to capture those soundscapes. And now you can hear some of the results on our audio map, Essex Sounds.

Horse riding through busy Maldon street, 1 Jan 2016

The hunt parade through Maldon, 1 January 2016. Image courtesy of Stuart Bowditch.

From church bells to firework displays; the annual New Year’s hunt parade through Maldon to the sounding of ship’s horns at Tilbury to bring in the New Year (yes, he managed to capture both, and more besides that day!): see if your suggestion of an Essex sound has been recorded.

In our public surveys about Essex sounds, many people commented on a perceived difference between the north and south of the county. Commonly, people considered the southern part of the county to contain more industrial noises, more hustle and bustle, more crowded atmospheres: with more people speaking with a London or ‘TOWIE accent’. The north was depicted as quieter, more rural, where the people are more likely to speak with a ‘traditional’ Essex accent.

A cow wading in a stream in Dedham Vale

Peaceful Dedham Vale in north Essex. Image courtesy of Visit Essex.

Is this an accurate depiction of the county, or is it over-generalised? Why not consult the Essex Sounds map to see if it reflects this north-south divide?

The map also enables comparisons between old and new sounds of the county. We have uploaded some historic recordings from the Archive. For example, you can listen to an auction at the Chelmsford cattle market in the 1950s.
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You can then compare it with a recording made on that site in 2015, capturing the busy atmosphere of High Chelmer on a Saturday. Try it out here.

If your sound suggestion has not yet been added, do not fear: our site is still a work in progress. Stuart will continue to record Essex sounds over the next few months, gradually uploading them to the audio map. We will also keep adding historic recordings as they are digitised, as part of this Heritage Lottery Funded project. We are also happy to continue to receive suggestions of places and events to record, though we will not be able to include everything within the scope of the project.

In the meantime, why not contribute your own recording to the site? We want the map to fully reflect your experiences of what Essex sounds like. You will find instructions on the ‘contribute’ page, but please get in touch if you have any questions.

We would love to hear any feedback you have, so that we can continue to improve the site and pass on your comments to our website developers, Community Sites. Please be gentle with us, though: we are still in the development phase! We would also be grateful for any volunteers to test the map more extensively, particularly if you are using accessibility software. Please get in touch to find out more.

For more information about the You Are Hear project, you can visit the project site.

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Essex Sound and Video Archive releases first recordings online

The Essex Sound and Video Archive is delighted to announce that we have started to post a selection of our recordings online for anyone to listen for free – recordings such as this clip from a Harold Wood Hospital Radio programme about the old manual telephone exchange in Brentwood (SA 19/1050/1).

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Image of Essex Youth Orchestra 45rpm lacquer disc from 1960

Example of an original recording in our collection that has been digitised for preservation and access

Thanks to funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for our project, You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place, we aim to digitise and catalogue 1900 of the 30,000 fascinating, diverse sound and video recordings in the Archive.

Once the material is in digital form, we can upload it to the sound sharing website, Soundcloud. Researchers no longer have to travel to the Playback Room at the Essex Record Office to listen to the material – though you would still be welcome if you want the experience of listening to an actual cassette or cd. Instead, you can listen on your computer at home, or download the Soundcloud app and listen on the go with your mobile or tablet.

We will be adding material gradually over the next three years – material such as this oral history interview with Ann Chapman (SA 13/7/2/1). It was recorded in 2010 at Fryerns Library, as part of their fiftieth anniversary celebrations. In Part 2 of the interview, Ann describes her childhood delight at jumping in muddy puddles when her family first moved to Basildon after living in crowded, built-up London. She then describes the many shopkeepers that offered door-to-door deliveries – though she also enjoyed trips to the shops with her mother.

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From summer 2016, we will be showcasing a selection of our recordings on interactive touchscreen kiosks and listening benches that will tour public locations across the county. Our Essex Sounds website will provide an opportunity to compare the sounds of Essex, past and present: historic sounds of places in Essex from the Archive will be pinned together with new recordings made by our Sound Recordist, Stuart Bowditch. People will also be able to pin their own sound recordings to the map, to help create a representative range across the county.

All these recordings are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. If you wish to use any material for commercial purposes, please get in touch. You can also get in touch if you are interested in listening to recordings that have not yet been uploaded to Soundcloud.
You Are Hear banner showing cassette tapes
To receive updates about the You Are Hear project, sign up to our mailing list.

For more information about the Essex Sound and Video Archive and the digitisation and consultancy services we provide, please visit our website.

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You Are Hear: What does it sound like?

Sarah-Joy Maddeaux of our You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place project muses on how sounds can transport us to difference times and places.

Smells and tastes are evocative senses; this is well-known. A whiff of a particular aroma instantly transports me to the place where I once encountered that scent. The smell of an extinguished match smells like birthdays, that moment at the party when you blow out the candles on the cake. The smell of chlorine takes me back to swimming lessons. The warm smell you encounter of an upstairs room on a hot day reminds me of summer; the dusty smell when you first put the heating on for the year reminds me of winter. As for the smell of a library book, well, that is a heavenly odour that evokes happy days spent discovering new texts and re-reading well-loved ones. A taste of a familiar food, too, can bring me back to childhood. A baked apple is associated with Bonfire Night; the first clementine of the season tastes like Christmas.

But sound? Certain songs remind me of a period in my life, or people I enjoyed the tunes with. But can ordinary, everyday sounds have the same effect? Working on the You Are Hear project has made me realise that, yes, sounds too can provoke memories of places encountered. After growing up in a port town, the horn of a ship reminds me of watching the slow progress of ocean-going vessels travelling through the locks. An oar quietly slipping through the water on a still morning brings back family canoeing trips. The honking of geese brings to mind autumn, and the start of a new academic year, with all the mingled expectation, fear, hope, and regret this entailed. The relentless clipping of hundreds of heels on hard floors, rhythmic but not quite in unison, will always remind me of my morning commute through the maze of underground tunnels during a brief period when I worked in London.

Thinking more about this, there are certain sounds that were distinctive to my childhood in the late twentieth century, sounds that only a comparative few (out of the course of human history) would identify with. The exquisitely sharp sound of a phonograph needle dropping into place, though this is enduring thanks to djs and music purists.

Record on record player

The drone of a dot matrix printer. The call of a dial-up modem (static at one pitch, static at a lower pitch, then wee-oh, wee-oh, all the while hoping, desperately hoping that it will connect).

For how much longer will these sounds be remembered? What sounds in human history have disappeared and been forgotten? In fifty years, will people know why the words ‘Unexpected item in baggage area’ spoken in an automated female voice provoke me to a frustrated rage because I HAVEN’T STARTED CHECKING OUT MY PURCHASES YET! Will an annoyingly chirpy whistle still prompt half of a bus-load of passengers to start rummaging in their bags looking for their phones?

Sound artists have realised the power of sound to evoke associations, and the danger of losing certain noises as our world changes. Aiming to record the present for future generations, they seek out those noises that compose everyday soundscapes, difficult to identify, but instantly recognisable to those who dwell in such soundscapes.

As part of the Heritage Lottery Funded project, You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place, we want to capture the sounds of twenty-first century Essex by making new recordings of what you can hear today. We will then pin these recordings to an online map, together with recordings made in similar locations or of similar activities decades ago, from recordings already in the Essex Sound and Video Archive. Will this show change, or continuity? I expect both.

We need your help. What sounds matter to you? What can you hear on a daily basis? What sounds do you think will disappear in ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years? We are holding public consultations to ask you, the residents of Essex, what sounds mean Essex to you, or what Essex sounds like. Come along to one of the following events and tell us about your soundscape, and why you are hearing what you are, where you are.

1-3 October: George Yard Shopping Centre, Braintree
29-31 October: Grays Shopping Centre, Grays
12 November: ecdp offices, Chelmsford
19-21 November: High Chelmer Shopping Centre, Chelmsford

You will also have the opportunity to test our prototype audio comparison map; take a beginner’s workshop on making your own sound recordings; and learn more about the project. If you cannot make it to these events, please do pass on your suggestions of Essex sounds to: Sarah-Joy Maddeaux, You Are Hear Project Officer.

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ERO is on HistoryPin!

We have finally joined HistoryPin, an online community which allows organisations or individuals to share historic pictures, videos or sound clips by virtually ‘pinning’ them to a map of the world.

We have been wanting to do this for a while, and the final catalyst was a project undertaken here recently by research intern Ashleigh Hudson on the history of Chelmsford High Street (lots more on this coming over the next few weeks).

Our first pins are photographs of our county town of Chelmsford taken by the famous Spalding family of photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fred Spalding senior was the first commercial photographer in the town, and his son and grandson (both also Fred Spalding) followed in his footsteps, leaving us a photographic archive of some 7,000 images.

As well as the images we’ve pinned so far, you can also listen to recordings from the Essex Sound and Video Archive showcasing what Essex sounded like in the past.

You can explore what we’ve pinned using the map or by browsing the collections we’ve put together (click on the right tab below to see the collections).

If you’re new to HistoryPin we will warn you – it’s addictive.

Click here to go to our HistoryPin channel, and here to go to the HistoryPin home page to explore everything that has been pinned from all over the world.

Essex Sound and Video Archive secures Heritage Lottery Fund investment

You Are Hear banner The You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place project has secured a grant of £276,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Essex Record Office announced today.

Over the course of three years, starting this autumn, the project will digitise and catalogue many of the historically significant sound and video recordings held in the Essex Sound and Video Archive. The recordings will then be used to help people in Essex develop and enhance their sense of place. Focussing primarily on oral history interviews, these recordings reveal the remarkable experiences of everyday people over the last century.

The project will work with community groups in villages and towns throughout Essex, helping them to reflect upon where they live by engaging with the recordings. Each group will create a sound montage of clips about their community from the Archive. The montage will then be installed on a sonic park bench. Whether placed on a village green, by the seaside, or in a shopping district, at the press of a button anyone will be able to listen to recordings from the past tell the story of where they are sitting.

Example sonic bench

Example of a sonic bench, installed at Llanyrafon Manor. Image courtesy of blackbox-av.

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In this clip, Ronald Poole recalls the institutions that lined Baddow Road in the days when he journeyed along it to and from school, comparing buildings long gone with current landmarks. Interview recorded by Chelmsford Museum in 1990 (SA 15/705/1).

The You Are Hear project team will also consult the public about which sounds of twenty-first-century Essex should be captured and archived. Based on these suggestions, an online audio map will enable comparisons between the historic sounds in the Archive and new sounds recorded during the project.

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The excitement running through this excerpt from the commentary of the memorable 1971 Colchester United v Leeds United FA Cup fifth-round match immerses the listener in the moment. What would a recording from this location sound like today, now that the old Layer Road stadium has been replaced by a housing estate? Recording courtesy of Micon Recording Company (SA 27/12/1).

Lastly, tours of interactive audio/video kiosks and sonic benches will showcase more recordings from the Archive, reaching every corner of the county.

County Councillor Roger Hirst, Cabinet Member for Customer Services, Libraries, Planning and the Environment said: “Digitisation of these irreplaceable records will safeguard them for future generations. Once digitised, they will be posted online for all to freely enjoy, without having to travel to the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford to hear them.”

Open reel tape

Open reel tape in the Essex Sound and Video Archive Studio: just one of the many formats we will digitise as part of the project

The digitised recordings will be accessible through the Essex Record Office online catalogue, Seax. From there you will also be able to browse the catalogue descriptions to see the rich variety of content in our collections.

Robyn Llewellyn, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund East of England, said: “From local accents to a nationally significant collection of folk music, the Essex Record Office holds the key to over a century of our county’s sounds. Thanks to National Lottery players we’re delighted to support this project which will enable even more people to benefit from this immersive connection to Essex’s heritage and ensure these sounds can be heard by generations to come.”

The Essex Heritage Trust and the Friends of Historic Essex will also contribute grants towards the project.

Essex Heritage Trust logo

Friends of Historic Essex logo

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Recordings like this music hall song by T. W. Connor, ‘Father Went Down to Southend’, can help people appreciate the county’s long heritage as a popular destination for a fun day out. Our dedication to preserving the original means we add little processing to the digitised recordings, trying to keep the end result as faithful to the original sound as possible. Recording released by Edison Bell in 1911 or 1912 (Acc. SA710 part).

There will be many opportunities for the public to get involved over the course of the project. Right now, we are looking for groups to adopt a sonic bench for the following communities: Burnham-on-Crouch, Chelmsford, Clacton-on-Sea, Coggeshall, Epping, Great Baddow, Southend-on-Sea, and Witham. We are also trying to trace past oral history participants to confirm our permission to use the recordings. Check our list of participants here to see if you recognise any names.

Please get in touch (sarahjoy.maddeaux [@] essex.gov.uk) if you want more information, or sign up here to receive updates on the project.

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Digitising discs at the Essex Sound and Video Archive

Martin Astell, Sound Archivist

The Essex Sound and Video Archive has fully equipped studios for digitising all kinds of sound recording media – from open reel tapes to digital DAT tapes; from shellac discs to vinyl discs to mini-discs. The equipment is used for making high quality digital copies of the many recordings held at the Essex Record Office, but we are also able to do the same for other people’s recordings too.

We recently had the pleasure of digitising an interesting recording for the London Metropolitan Archives. It is a 78rpm shellac disc containing a speech made by Viscount Wakefield of Hythe on the occasion of him being made a freeman of the City of London in July 1935. As well as being able to hear a unique voice from the past – one of the constant joys of the Sound Archivist – this was an interesting disc to transfer for a couple of other reasons.

Because this was a ‘private’ recording, rather than one made for general release, the disc has no B-side. Instead this side is decorated with rather beautiful patterns and the “His Master’s Voice” legend.

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The second thing I noticed on examining the disc before the digitisation transfer was that it had become somewhat warped. This is not necessarily a problem as the groove remains intact. However, because the disc is travelling quite quickly on the turntable – at 78rpm this means a complete rotation in less than a second – a warped disc can cause the stylus to jump out of the groove, not only spoiling the recording but potentially damaging the surface of the disc as it lands.

To avoid this risk I began by playing the disc at a much slower speed with the intention of correcting the sound digitally if it proved necessary. The speed was increased gradually to ensure the stylus was safely held in the groove at all times and, in the event, I was able to complete the digital transfer at the correct speed.

The disc was also cleaned on a VPI record cleaning machine. As the disc spins, the cleaning fluid is carefully placed on the recording surface avoiding the paper label in the centre of the disc. The fluid is worked into the groove with the brush and then removed using the vacuum. The process is then repeated using distilled water.

The London Metropolitan Archives now have a high quality digital copy of the speech which can be preserved for the future and, being digital, is much easier to make available for researchers.

If you have sound recordings which you would like digitised, give me a call at the Essex Record Office on 033301 32500.

Recording of the Month, December 2014: Roger Smith and his Talking Guitar

Our Sound Archivist Martin Astell brings us another highlight from the Essex Sound and Video Archive…

Acc. SA586

For our December recording I have resisted the temptation to select one of our many recordings which relate to Christmas. However, I feel we should end the year with a bit of fun so I have chosen a remarkable performance of musical skill and ingenuity.

Roger Smith spent his retirement living quietly in Heybridge. Previous to that he had travelled the world as a musician playing the steel guitar. As well as being able to play the pedal steel (or Hawaiian) guitar, he also built his own version of the instrument designed to imitate the human voice. We know that Roger Smith performed with Felix Mendelsohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders in the late 1940s but, unfortunately, he died before we were able to talk to him in detail about his career. If you have more information, please let us know.

This recording is taken from an instantaneous disc recorded in 1948 with the title of Nit Wit Serenade.

Eric Clapton may have been compared to God in the 1960s for his abilities as a guitarist, but could he perform the feats achieved by Roger Smith?

Recording of the Month, October 2014: “Dingie ‘Underd Ghoost o’ ‘Alloween”

Our Sound Archivist Martin Astell brings us another highlight from the Essex Sound and Video Archive…

SA 24/221/1

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it is possible that some may knock on your door at the end of October. For that reason, I have chosen this ghostly tale – supposedly recounted in Essex dialect – as our recording for this month.

We know that the poem was written (and presumably spoken) by Mr J. London of Collier Row at some point in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, we know very little else about this delightful curiosity.

It tells of supernatural goings-on in Essex’s Dengie peninsula, which is still referred to by the historic term of the Dengie Hundred, and why on ‘’Alloween Eve’ you may still hear ghostly cries as you travel through its misty lanes. According to ‘The Witches of Dengie’ by Eric Maple (published in Folklore, Volume 73, Autumn 1962), “the Hundred of Dengie was until comparatively modern times regarded as ‘Witch Country’, to use a local term for any district where the traditions of witchcraft were very strong.” This article goes on to describe reputed encounters with witches said to have the power of flight – “like other witches of the Essex marshlands” – and a number of tales involving horses and carts affected by witchcraft. One wonders whether Mr London had heard some of these tales before he sat down to compose his tale.

Centre disc label

The poem begins: “Should ye ever goo in a pub called Kickin’ Dickey, down Dingie ‘underd way” which is curious as we find no record of a pub with this name in the area. There is a pub called Kicking Dickey in Great Dunmow in Essex, but this is decidedly not in the Dengie Hundred. However, ‘dickey’ is a dialect term for donkey, so could it be that locals used Kickin’ Dickey as a nickname for the White Horse in Southminster, or Mundon, or even the village of Dengie?

If you know, let us know.

Essex Sounds Like…

For the past six months, we have been surveying people across Essex to ask them what they know about the Essex Sound and Video Archive (ESVA). The main aim of the exercise was to collect baseline data, so we will have some statistics to compare with similar surveys we plan to run after the You Are Hear: sound and a sense of place project. We hope this will demonstrate the impact of the project to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and that more people will be aware of us and have engaged with our treasure store of recordings.

We surveyed our long-suffering readers in the Searchroom, so frequently asked for feedback; visitors to events that we attended; and innocent passers-by who happened to be walking through High Chelmer Shopping Centre, Chelmsford on Saturday 1 March. We even roped in the aid of libraries and village agents to distribute our surveys. The end result was 185 surveys completed by people from near and far (even some from outside Essex snuck in).

Our main aim was to establish how many people had heard of the Essex Sound and Video Archive. Forty percent of the people who answered this question knew about the ESVA but had never used it, but another 54% had not even heard of us. We obviously have some work to do!

We collected demographic information about our participants, but we also took the opportunity to ask some more interesting questions about people’s perceptions of where they live.  Eighty-six percent of participants felt they belonged to some kind of community: mostly their town or village, but social or religious groups, neighbourhoods, and on-line communities also featured. Despite a few references to the stereotypes associated with Essex (thanks largely to a certain ITV television programme), most people had positive associations with the county. Several referred to it as home or felt rooted to it by family ties. Some mentioned its attractive features, such as the seaside, the countryside, the good travel links – and the fact that it’s not London. We hope to build on this  undercurrent of pride in the county by sharing what former residents have felt about their homeland, what they experienced, and what they felt moved to create in it.

The most interesting question to me was, ‘Which sounds represent where you live?’ Although it initially puzzled a few people, we eventually got some wonderful descriptions of the aural landscape of the county. The overwhelming majority of the responses were precisely what I would have identified in my own town: Essex sounds like traffic and birds.

We created a word cloud from all of the responses received: the bigger the word, the more times it was mentioned. How does the picture compare with your location?

sounds wordcloud aug 2014

Wordcloud of sounds associated with Essex, created with www.wordle.net

In the spirit of You Are Hear, we have a sound clip alternative:

At the moment the clip is just the words spoken aloud: the recording of the actual sounds will come once the project starts, with your help.

Thank you to everyone who completed a survey or helped to distribute them. Get in touch if you want to read more about the results.

Recording of the Month, September 2014: Mrs Cranwell’s Driving Test

Our Sound Archivist Martin Astell brings us another highlight from the Essex Sound and Video Archive…

SA 47/1/1/4/1

This month’s recording highlights the principal joy of working with oral history. That is, the fact that it is about people. Everybody has a story to tell, but some tell them better than others. Mrs Irene Cranwell from the village of Chrishall in Essex falls into the category of characters whose personality bursts out of the recorded interview, and in this extract she describes her somewhat unusual driving test in Cambridge.

Irene Cranwell died in 2010 at the age of 99, having become a local celebrity through regular contributions to a BBC Cambridgeshire radio show. She had been a teacher at Chrishall village school and later worked at Barkway First School and Icknield Walk First School in Royston. She also, apparently, had an impressive knowledge of local history and started a museum in Chrishall based on her own collection.

When listening to oral history interviews we should not forget the contribution of the interviewer who, in this case, has created a relaxed and congenial atmosphere, allowing the interviewee to express herself in a free and uninhibited manner.