Listen Up!

Details

Age group: GCSE, A Level and undergraduate.

Available: All year, Mondays and Fridays.

Length: 120 minutes. Please allow more time after your workshop to explore the galleries and public spaces.

Group size: minimum of 10 participants.

Key Skills

Music, Composition

Workshop outline

Listen Up! is a workshop that explores material from the British Library's Sound Archive and discusses the nature of sound and how it can be classified and recorded. By drawing on a wide range of collection items, from animal sounds to music (both popular and classical), as well as the British Library's own collection of musical scores, this interactive workshop focuses on the auditory environment as we experience it both in everyday life and in music. The material will be used to raise the following questions:

• How accustomed are we to listening?
• When does sound become speech or music, and what characteristics do they share?
• How can we describe sound?
• How can we use visual ideas to record sound?

Groups are given the option of a 15 minute introductory talk from the Sound Archive which looks at how participants could use their resources in the future. Please state your interest in this when booking.

Alternatively, you can organise a talk with Jonathan Robinson, our leading expert in English accents and dialects. Jonathan will introduce ways of analysing spoken English, focusing on the dual aspects of language change and language variation. He will also talk about our new website, Sounds Familiar? which launched earlier this year.

Post-visit activities

During the workshop, participants will be given the opportunity to create a graphic score. This score could be recorded at school/college/university and then given to the Sound Archive to become part of the collection.

Investigate Sounds Familiar? a site which captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century.

Explore British Library Sound Archive collections , which includes music, drama, oral history, sound effects, wildlife sounds and much more.

How to book

Our How to Book page has further information about our booking process. To make your booking or for further information about our workshops, please contact the Learning Team on +44 (0)20 7412 7797 or email us at learning@bl.uk.