Sound Archives and Online Repositories

Few institutions prominently feature sound recordings of architectural spaces directly. Archives may include audio/visual materials that offer sources of study, such as descriptions of built environments by witnesses, performances conducted in certain built environments, or unintended "background" recordings, that can be rich in contextual information. Many national archives hold collections that are a helpful starting point for researchers (for one example, the National Sound Library of Mexico also includes an interactive map with hundreds of field recordings: https://mapasonoro.cultura.gob.mx/). Focused or private collections oriented around specific regions, stakeholders, or themes are also available; the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) provides a helpful listing of diverse archival collections (https://www.iasa-web.org/links?tid=All&combine=&field_country_value=All), as does the Observatorio de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovisuales de Iberoamérica (Observatory of Sound and Audiovisual Archives of Iberoamerica, https://www.ripdasa.iibi.unam.mx/geoportal/home). The recordings and outputs of smaller research projects are often located online as well, such as the Social Housing Sound Archive (https://www.socialhousingsoundarchive.com/), The Roaring Twenties, a companion interactive website to Emily Thompson's book The Soundscape of Modernity (http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html), or the "One Square Inch Project" (https://onesquareinch.org/). The following institutions contain holdings relevant to acoustics in the context of built heritage:

British Library Sound Archive, https://sounds.bl.uk/**

As one of the foremost sound archives worldwide, the British Library's Sound Archive soundscapes collection is among the largest sources of acoustic ecology, urban environments, and preserved locations in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. Lighthouses, churches, and industrial sites feature prominently in their "Sounds and Society" section.

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Sound and Science: Digital Histories, https://acoustics.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/**

This digitization project by the Epistemes for Modern Acoustics research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science allows users to examine hundreds of items in the database. This is a newer site with excellent resources and essays from a wide range of scholars that contextualize the recordings. Search categories include performance spaces (such as theaters, concert halls, lecture halls), industrial laboratories, hospitals, and laboratories.

Library of Congress, Recorded Sound Research Center, https://loc.gov/rr/record/

In addition to preserving most of the audio-visual, musical, and broadcast material produced in the United States, the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress has oral histories, live music, and audio field recordings specific to stated built environments.

World Soundscape Project Database, https://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html

A comprehensive collection of recordings, interviews, and other materials related to the "World Soundscape Project," the education and research group at Simon Fraser University that established much of the terminology and approaches to soundscape and humansonic relationships since forming in the 1960s. The database includes seminal projects in North America and Europe.

EMI Archive Trust, https://www.emiarchivetrust.org/collection/

Including most of the recordings produced by EMI Records, the EMI Archive Trust holds a comprehensive collection related to the historic development of sound recording in general. This includes, for example, robust holdings on acoustic horns, lathes, and playback devices—media technologies that, when traced, afford the development of approaches to recording an event in space.

Indiana University, Archives of Traditional Music, https://libraries.indiana.edu/archives-traditional-music

The Archives of Traditional Music is among the largest university collections of ethnographic sound, including one of the most extensive wax cylinder archives in the world. Its collection includes the oldest known "stereo" recording of a live musical performance in China (ca. 1901), and by default one of the first indoor recordings ever produced, restored in the summer 2020.

Phonogrammerarchiv, https://oeaw.ac.at/phonogrammarchiv/

Founded in 1899, the Phonogrammerarchiv in Vienna is the oldest sound archive in the world. Among its mission activities is to collect scientific sound and video recordings from a variety of disciplines and geographic locations. Although primarily ethnolinguistic and ethnomusicological, the Phonogrammer Archiv has a large number of musical recordings in a broad range of contexts, institutions, and...