Podcast produced and presented by Jo Barratt.

"No human sense is more neglected in ethnographic museums than sound".  The  Reel to Real project at the Pitt Rivers Museum seeks to redress the balance by making available, both in and beyond the museum space itself, the important sound collections donated to the museum over the past 100 years.

In this podcast, the second in our Pitt Rivers series, Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol talk to ethnomusicologist, Dr Noel Lobley about the hundreds of hours of historically important and rare ethnographic sound held in storage in the museum, much of it known only to a handful of scholars. These sound recordings – which range from children’s songs in Britain to music from South America and the South Pacific, and from improvised water drumming to the sound of rare earth bows in the rainforests of the Central African Republic – have been preserved but until the Real to Real project have remained unavailable to members of the public, teachers, students, or to the communities from which the sound originates.

Listen here to the first podcast, Louis Sarno and the BayAka

Note:  The Reel to Real archive is being made available via SoundCloud

Transcript

Welcome to the Pitt Rivers museum at the University of Oxford. This is Pod Academy and I'm Jo Barrett. We're here for a series looking at the ethnographic sound archive at the museum. This episode is going to look in detail at the Reel to Real project and the work being done to make the most of an unappreciated resource. We also hear how sound can contribute to the overall museum experience. Noel Lobley is going to be an ever-present voice in this series as he guides us through several aspects of his work in ethnomusicology and sound archive.

Noel Lobley: My name is Noel Lobley. I work here at the Pitt Rivers museum as an ethnomusicologist. I deal with a lot of the music and sound collections. For the last 18 months or so a lot of my time has been devoted to developing the sound archive. Pulling it out of storage and getting it digitised, heard and available. Also programming events to engage different audiences with the sound collections that we have here.

JB: You will also hear from Sarah Winkler-Reid an anthropologist from the University of Bristol.  Who joined Noel and I in Oxford. For those of you who do not know about the museum, here is Noel to tell us about his place of work.

 

NL: The Pitt Rivers Museum is the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology it's got wonderful ethnographic galleries that are absolutely crammed with hundreds and thousands of objects from cultures all over the world. Some pre-historic, some modern. It was established by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers who donated his collection here and has been curated here since [sic] 1884.

 

Henry Balfour was the first curator here, he was a polymath, he was ahead of his time. He was interested in decorative art, sound and music which started the collection of sound here which has been happening for over 100 years. There are photographic, manuscript and massive object collections. What you see in the galleries are used as research, teaching resources, and to engage the general public, such as children and schools. It is a very family friendly museum, it has won awards for being accessible to children. We have our own education department here. It's a varied and diverse museum, but it is a part of Oxford University.

JB: Noel is here to talk to us about the Reel to Real project which is the focus of this episode. I asked him to sum up the project in one sentence.

NL: Reel to Real is giving the Pitt Rivers' museum sound collection a voice. Reel to Real is a project designed to digitise,