Documentation of Recordings [Arthur Delbridge] [Alexander George (AG) Mitchell] (Series 843)

Alexander George (AG) Mitchell and Arthur Delbridge were both staff in the Department of English, and had a major interest in Australian speech. This series contains recordings of the first large socio-linguistic study undertaken in the world. When the project began, Mitchell was the McCaughey Professor of Early English Literature and Language, then becoming the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Delbridge was a Lecturer in the Department of English and had at one time been a student of Mitchell. 

The Mitchell and Delbridge study made use of taped recordings of speech, and by not relying exclusively on the ear of one researcher, ensured a greater degree of stability in the analysis. It made use of the then relatively new process of spectrographic analysis in analysing vowel data. Further, the study made use of the power of computer based statistical analysis, performed by SILLIAC, one of the world's first major stored program computers.The study inspired William Labov to undertake a similar study in the USA. More information on the study can also be found in Book 1 of the companion documents (Series 843).

These reel to reel tapes and the supporting documentation (Series 843) were original housed in the University's Phonetics Laboratory in the Quadrangle in poor conditions. When the Phonetics Laboratory moved to be with the rest of the Department of Linguistics, the tapes and paperwork were moved to a worse home - under glass in a hot corridor. The documentation was subsequently lost. Brian Taylor, Director of the Language Centre, noticed the tapes in their glass case and immediately arranged the transfer of the tapes to an air-conditioned room. At the same time, Julie Vonwiller, a linguist working with Electrical and Information Engineering, who had seen and used the tapes and paperwork in the old Phonetics Laboratory, began hunting for these 'lost' records. Both Taylor and Vonwiller recognised that the recordings are a valuable linguistic, social and historical record of the speech of Australians from the 1950s and 1960s, that could be used for longitudinal linguistic studies, at the very least. Taylor and Vonwiller approached the then Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), Roger Tanner, for funding to preserve and reissue the tapes. The tapes were sent to the Sound Preservation Section of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) where they were re-spooled and repaired. The NFSA also undertook the transfer of the recordings from the tapes to Digital Audio Tapes (DAT) (Series 845). The tapes were returned to their air-conditioned home at the University, while the DATs were sent to the the Speech Group at Electrical and Information Engineering. The Speech Group transferred the recordings to digital files on a computer.

This series contains the copy recordings from the original tapes on DATs, CDs and cassettes. The Australian National Corpus has published the Mitchell and Delbridge collection/database, containing the WAV files of the recordings - https://www.ausnc.org.au/corpora/md (accessed on 31/05/2022).

This series contains the documentation of the recording of school children and correspondence.

The Mitchell & Delbridge Tapes 1998 Re-Issue. https://speech.library.sydney.edu.au/speech/MDReport.php. Accessed on 31/05/2022. Mitchell and Delbridge collection. Australian National Corpus. https://www.ausnc.org.au/corpora/md. Accessed on 31/05/2022.