True Echoes

Abstract

This article describes True Echoes, a three-year project initiated by the British Library to research its Oceanic wax cylinder collections and to reconnect digitised sound recordings with their originating communities. These collections, recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comprise some of the earliest recordings of Pacific cultures and histories and represent the early use of sound recording for European anthropological research in the region. The recordings were made in Papua New Guinea,Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and the Torres Strait Islands of Australia. They, along with the British Library’s wider collection of ethnographic cylinders, were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011.This article concentrates on some of the earliest recordings, 102 wax cylinders of the Alfred Cort Haddon 1898 Expedition (Torres Strait and British New Guinea) Cylinder Collection (C80). The collection also contains 39 cylinders recorded in Papua New Guinea, which will not be discussed here. Research methods involved historical research in partnership with Oceanic cultural institutions and participatory research with community members, which provided local knowledge and new information. The “multi-perspectivist approach” employed by the project team was important for gathering a variety of perspectives on the collections and for revealing “the complex processes involved in their production, collection and interpretation”.