VOICE MUSEUM.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13411, 8 May 1912, Page 3

VOICE MUSEUM.

Last summer (says the Paris correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph") the first voice museum of the world was created by the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. It is being gradually developed, and phonograph records of language spoken and sung are being collected. They will be of priceless use to future generations, and philologists can scarcely conceive how much better off they would bo now if the phonograph had been known since antiquity, and its records had been kept-like ancient papyri and parchment. A new schemo is proposed in connection with tho voico museum. The dialects and patois of France, some of which, like Breton, Basque, and Provencal, are no dialects, but real languages, are slowly dying out. The Sorbonne proposes to equip a 'motor car with phonographs and send it in the care of a lingucst and presumably a chauffeur as well, to tour the-whole of Franco inch by inch. In every village the phonograph would take down the local speech, and the discs would remain a priceless record for future philolopists. The directorate of the voice museum estimates that it would take ten years and £4,000 a year to record all the various languages spoken in France. Somo similar method might bo adopted for setting down, for instance, the ancient .Morris songs of England, which were unknown to cultivated musicians a dozen years ago, though centuries old and which a handful of enthusiasts are now laboriously noting by ear. They are, lam told, as moribund as French dialects, and only old people still sing them. A voice museum for tho English country might save thorn while there is yet time.