 about this and it's not a it's not a social history from the women it's to hear their voices and bear in mind that they're like they're over a hundred years old well in the history of audio recording something that you'll be very familiar with you don't hear female voices in the very beginning it's a very very small percentage of audio that we can replay hard forms of audio engraved in wax eventually pressed or on tape even how did they come about in the first place it happened right after the island unfortunately divided but you had the irish free state and there was great interest in elevating the irish spoken language also i think i mean i'm just this is just repeating things everybody knows here but for me it was a discovery how many people were lost who actually spoke the indigenous dialects of ireland and i found that enormously interesting just to start with but also i just stumbled across a collection of audio that was made by a german linguist who was commissioned by um was it the irish language there was a committee that was set up to try and save the dying dialects of ireland or at least to collect samples of the so-called dying dialects of ireland so it was a german linguist and his engineer carl temple who came to ireland in 1928 they had a session in 1930 and 1931 the engineer came on his own and that was the first time we heard women in these recordings but recordings of any sort it would be a big deal back then oh well yeah i mean if you consider that for three minutes of audio you had about a kilo of wax on uh discs roughly the size of two dinner plates stacked one on top of the other so it was a very big production so was the recording equipment similar to like a record player it would look very similar although much more crude so instead of having um an electronic microphone they used a cone back in the old days you had gramophones and in fact what i found very interesting was finding out if these cones were designed for the higher pitch of female voices at all and it turned out no uh this was in fact a cone that was used for a series of very interesting recordings that were made in prisoner of war camps on old german territory during the first world war when the linguist who was commissioned eventually by the irish free state had been recording voices of prisoners of war who had been recruited by the british empire french empire armies and were on german soil and that was a fantastic opportunity for them to collect samples of over 80 different languages so i guess that's what brought his attention so he took the cone with him to record the voices in here it was astonishing how much effort went into getting exactly that cone here to ireland which means to me that this cone was set up mainly to accommodate tenor baritone voices a voice like your own and for my own voice back in the day when i was working in radio i had to learn to deepen my voice so anybody would take it seriously so times have changed a bit but i grew up at a time when you didn't even see women broadcasting the news they just didn't exist you couldn't hear them you couldn't see them so things have changed quite a bit absolutely uh the the voices that we hear in this are they is the language irish or english 100 irish different dialects um i think out of 137 people who were recorded and they made often more than one little recording at a time so you'd have 30 second samples you'd have 120 seconds you'd have depending on how long broken up by the size it would be broken up according to what they were asked to say so what why are they asked to say well they weren't they weren't asked anything about their deep knowledge of their home their culture their experience in life the objective in this case was not to collect oral history but it was simply to try and find samples so they could compare dialects how people spoke the choice of words pronunciations and so um what was wonderful for us and for the scholars who became interested in this later on these women and men were interviewed and they were asked where did they grow up where did they move to how many children did they have what were their occupations so the women actually have occupations listed so not just a wife but rather a farmer's wife or someone who's a fisherwoman or someone who might be teaching which was rare okay and it was mostly men that were involved in in this initiative there was 20 women but that was 25 of them donnie gall yes five of them came from donnie gall i'd been calling it donnie gall for ages but i've been corrected and at the risk of butchering the names i won't say the names but i can tell you where they're from okay so we have places that i was actually able to see last november because i did a around through donnie gall then we have one lady from ardor ardra ardra one lady a young girl actually she's the youngest in the group 16 from duchery there's a 17 year old from ranafast and a 70 year old from fanat and a 60 year old from i'm going to get it wrong so i'll say the larger place nearby crawly and i would say that the average age of the women who were recorded would have been in their 50s or 60s they were picked up by and i quote motor car and brought to the locations where they could be recorded where the equipment was set up and in the case of donnie gall this was the old courthouse which is what brought me to latter kenny in the first place and i thought great building i'd love to put this here but the building isn't being used anymore so i was sent off to donnie gall county museum and i just walked in off the street and said hey and they have been tremendously open-minded about what i could do with them and very supportive including the theater and the cultural center we've been borrowing equipment and running back and forth up and down the hill and it's just been a wonderful experience so what what form does it take if i go along to to have a listen what you know how are the voices how have you put the voices together well first of all we've transformed a room into a place where you can sit on the floor the lights are low we have a few chairs everything is very comfortable and very quiet and rather dark and so you have a chance to be with the voices in this composition that comes to you in various creative ways through six different speakers in the room it's not a very loud environment intentionally so and i looked a very long time to find the right kind of speakers so you feel the voices coming from literally almost a human being and so it's a very intimate feeling space and this is you know my art do we have pictures of the subjects or is it just all i don't want you to have that i would like to make these voices become part of your lived experience and it's a way of taking female voices off the shelves more or less dusty shelves of very very rather forgotten archive and i must say i would really like to thank the royal irish academy for having gone to the trouble of digitizing these recordings they worked very very closely with wilhelm durgen and his engineer they did the interpreting they found the people they set it all up so that it would be rather smooth sailing for the germans who came and did the recordings so if they hadn't digitized all of this over 12 years ago 15 years actually now i wouldn't have found any of this and i wouldn't be sitting here in the studio with you and finally what's the quality like i mean given the the rudimentary methods to record back in the day what's what's the quality like i can mimic it would you like me to mimic it it sounds a lot i didn't do anything to clean it up because i value very much that sound um it sounds a lot like that's how it sounds to me but you do have snow you have a lot of snow or crackles as we know but i'd like to make a point for your listeners i'm looking very much for people who are spoken word artists or who are very comfortable speaking in front of other people or would like to just have time for themselves and record themselves on their own phones if they want with this ambience that i've been building okay so it's available now to go along and have a listen to at the county museum and to participate in yes yes and after that then you're you're going on tour with it well i wish it sounds i mean canadians were rather modest if i were american i would probably hype it up a little more i've been very very touched by things that people have told me while i've been here and i'm incorporating that in the way the sound compositions there are many develop so after here in january in february i take it to montreal where i'm from and we add on at that point additional older voices so it grows like a snowball and you know in a very modest way symbolic way what i'm hoping to do is retell the history of recording with at its core 20 irish voices that came from women who lived mostly on the land or in very small villages and with that we grow an alternative sound these are sounds that are not really they were not part of how women learned how to hear or how you learned how to hear as a young kid and i like very much the idea of having them without reference to male voices lovely as your own voice thank you thank you ever so much well listen it's the irish room installation and it runs through until the 8th of december and admission is free it's important to stress that and if you if you're bringing along a group just contact the the county museum in advance or for more information contact the museum as well and the best of luck with it here and beyond juan appreciate you coming in thank you