Songs go on stream

Edinburgh University is using the latest Internet audio technology to boost research into Scottish traditions and folklore.

Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies, which systematically records Scotland's traditional life and culture, has launched its PEARL (Providing Ethnological Archives for Research and Learning) server, offering real-time audio streams from its archive, backed by text, translations from Gaelic, and photographs.

The 300 hours of songs, tales, customs and other oral traditions are drawn from the school's magazine Tocher, which is principally based on tape recordings made by fieldworkers and students over the past 50 years.

The project has been funded through the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council's initiative on use of the broadband metropolitan area networks, and uses RealAudio technology from the American company Progressive Networks. The school has a version of RealAudio which will not be on release until next year. The server can support up to 40 simultaneous audio streams, and trials over the MANs and SuperJanet confirm that it can deliver near-FM quality monophonic audio to the user's workstation.