The Biblical Record : Y Record Beiblaidd
- Submitting institution
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Aberystwyth University / Prifysgol Aberystwyth
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 41437956
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This multi-component practice-as-research output required 18 months intensive work to create a 42-minute CD from the first-ever recorded reading of the entire Judaeo-Christian Bible. Research involved the full transcription and re-equalisation of 67 vinyl records dating from 1964, each holding 170 minutes of speech. Individual words, milliseconds long, were located on and extracted from densely recorded discs without track divisions. The research effort also required developing techniques of editing, alignment, synchronisation and superimposition, while joining processes of biblical harmonisation to comparative textual analysis native to hermeneutics added further complexity.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In 1964, a recording of all sixty-six books of the Authorised Version of the Bible was produced by the American Foundation for the Blind for their Talking Book series, which was designed to give unsighted people access to important works of literature. Read by the American actor Alexander Scourby (1913-85), it was the first complete acoustic capture of the Scripture ever attempted. The Talking Bible was released as five volumes of 10-inch, long-playing records, running at 16⅔ rpm. The sixty-seven records represent almost 170 hours of spoken text.
Prior interpretation of the scriptures, both in sound and images, have dealt with only portions of the text. The Biblical Record project constitutes a departure from the tradition of biblical representation in that seeks to make a totalising response to the source. The ambition was intelligently to compress and give unique shape to the source by the imposition of a thematic structure. Four strands of narratives are interwoven: the bible; the world in the year the set was recorded; the nature of the medium; and the history of my copy of the set. At the same time, the objective was to include all of the source, in one form or other, in the suite. This involved the technical compression of the material, along with precise editing, alignment, synchronisation, and techniques of superimposition, as well as the development of methods for locating individual phrases and words on densely recorded discs without track divisions.
The project opened up a new approach to exploring Scripture through non-music-orientated sound, while allying its methodology to biblical scholarship’s harmonisation, cross-referencing, and elucidation of texts. It also contributes to homiletics by demonstrating how the spoken word can be made more emotional, dramatic, and poignant in its impact. This interdisciplinary approach and its application have never before been attempted.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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