Kamiran Bedirxan's Voice Recordings in the Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) of Humboldt University- Berlin

Year 2025, Volume: 11 Issue: 2, 609 - 627, 21.09.2025

Necat Keskin

https://doi.org/10.21600/ijoks.1737878

Abstract

Recording sounds became possible with the invention of the phonograph at the end of the 19th century. Through this invention, sounds could be recorded easily anywhere in the World. And because the recordings were made in different parts of the World and were indeed dispersed in far off and distant locations, there came about a need to store them in centralized places. Accordingly, sound archives were established in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century; one of them was the Berlin Phonogram Archive, established in 1900 by Professor Carl Stumpf under the auspices of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University). The Berlin Phonogram Archive is preserved under the auspices of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology and works with several other museums under the auspices of the Humboldt Forum. In addition to the aforementioned Archive, there is also a sound archive (Lautarchiv) under the auspices of the Humboldt University. In the latter archive, we came across some Kurdish recordings, the voice of Kamiran Bedirxan (as Kamuran Ali Bedir-Chan in the archive). As is known, Kamiran Bedirxan is a famous Kurdish figure and has a central place in the Kurdish political, social and cultural history. Therefore, the existence and finding of recordings of his voice in such a famous archive is significant. There were alltogether four recordings, which according to the catalogue were added to the archive in 1937.They were recorded from the French colony, round about Aleppo. At that time, Kamiran Bedirxan was also living and doing his intellectual activities in this region. There is no information about how the recordings were made or how they were sent to Berlin. Most likely they reached Germany through personal contacts of Kamiran Bedirxan himself. After becoming aware of these recordings, we contacted the archive managers and under agreement, they sent us the audio as MP3. According to our research, there has been no study or research on these records. This archive is coming to light with this work and this also increases the uniqueness and importance of our study. In this regard, it also contributes to the Kurdish cultural heritage. This article includes information about the archive; about the aforementioned recordings and their decoding, as well as an assessment of their content and importance. We hope that our successes however meagre will aid the search for other Kurdish recordings in various archives around the world.

Keywords

Humboldt University- Berlin , Kamiran Bedirxan , Kurdish , Lautarchiv , Sound archive.

Thanks

I would like to thank the head of the Lautarchiv collection at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Dr. Christopher Li, and also Mr. Charly Bischoff, for their generosity and assistance in the process of obtaining and sending these recordings.

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