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Blogging researcher at the British Library
Blogging researcher at the British Library
The following was published in an internal newletter of the British Library:
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In August Israeli musicologist and composer Avior Byron was awarded one of the Library’s prestigious Edison Fellowships to carry out research on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. He found the British Library facilities to be of great help in his continuing research that combined the examination of sound recordings from CDs, LPs and the Library’s SoundServer with printed scores and printed books. |
Schoenberg’s music sounded very modern in its day and still has the power to shock. Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of poems for voice and chamber group, except the voice does not sing, but intones the text to approximate pitches using Sprechstimme – the ‘spoken voice’.
Dr Byron’s analysis used special visualisation software in the Sound Archive to reveal that the pitch of the voice suggested bySchoenberg’s score in fact varies with each performer.
He commented: “This is the most advanced software I have seen for analysing recordings.
I find it very useful for hearing very short extracts of music repeatedly as in a loop. It provides opportunities to see sound representations and hear things that are not discernable during normal listening to recordings.”
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Dr Byron has shared his findings through his blog and Twitter even using ‘tweets’ to take research notes. “The blog gives me more space than Twitter to express myself, yet it is still less formal than academic publishing in journals and books. It was surprising and encouraging to see how people in the British Library were enthusiastic about my tweeting. It certainly shows that the British Library is in the forefront of technology.” Richard Ranft, Head of the Sound Archive, comments: “as part of a review of the S&C directorate, staff have been preparing scenarios on future research use of the Library’s collections and services. Dr Byron’s research methods, his needs for a variety of analogue and digital sources and his sharing with fellow academics worldwide of his discoveries online and in real-time, is a powerful example of how researcher behaviour is changing.” |
For more information about the Edison Fellowships please contact Jonathan Summers
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