Recording and remembering the sounds of Africa: ethnomusicology, sound archiving and sound elicitation

Conference item

Enchanted by recordings of African pygmy song, in 1986 Louis Sarno, an American carpenter, put down his tools and bought a one-way ticket to the Central African Republic. He still lives there today recording songs from the forest and has become an advocate for indigenous land and political rights. During the last three decades, he has built an unprecedented archive of recordings of music, which also includes images of performance and every-day life of a little known and endangered nomadic community. Until recently, this archive remained virtually unknown, lying wrapped in an old jumper inside a battered suitcase in a storeroom in Oxford. Using examples from Sarno’s archive and from my own doctoral fieldwork in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, during which I examined the potential contemporary relevance of the musicologist Hugh Tracey’s Sound of Africa series, a recording map of the musical memory of sub-Saharan Africa, I illustrate the value of ‘sound elicitation’. This method, the circulation of archival recordings through local social mechanisms, is an attempt to build ongoing relationships between sound recordings and indigenous communities, to enhance collections of field recordings, and to try and ensure sensible and reciprocal sharing of musical and cultural knowledge.

Authors: Lobley, N

• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Not peer reviewed
• Publication date: 2011-01-01
• Keywords: Field recordings; Babenzélé; African music; Sound elicitation; Sound archives; Outreach; Xhosa
• Subjects: Ethnomusicology; Anthropology