About Vibes: A History of Urban Music

Birmingham has a rich collection of community oral histories gathered from across the West Midlands. The Voices of the City project is the first step in a wider ambition to work with community participants and volunteers, to explore how these histories can be acknowledged in the story of how the city and the wider region became what it is today. Click here to listen to Vibes: A History of Urban Music.

Focusing on four specific collections and working with BMT’s dedicated team of volunteers to transcribe interviews and participants to generate key search terms, we aim to make the following archives publicly available over the next two years.

Join us for our listening sessions to help is identify key words, discuss the use of AI in Oral History Transcription, or to simply find out more about the Voices of the City project.

Content warning

Some of the Vibes recordings include explicit and racially explicit language, discussions of racism, prejudice and violence and might be unsuitable for younger listeners and triggering for others.

More about Vibes

Vibes - A History of Urban Music is the first of the collections to be made publicly available and focuses on collecting histories of Black/urban music, following specific contemporary genres from their presence in the West Midlands back through their roots in the Caribbean and West Africa. The collection includes interviews with major Black urban musicians exploring African and African-Caribbean urban music cultures in Birmingham and Coventry.