The Archives internationales de musique populaire (AIMP) is a sound archives of about 20,000 hours of recordings, or nearly 120,000 pieces, created in Geneva in 1944 by the Romanian musicologist Constantin Brăiloiu (1893-1958). They are dedicated to the musical traditions of the five continents.

Neglected for 25 years, the AIMPs were revived in 1984 by Laurent Aubert (born in 1949). Since then, the IAFM have been enriched by several thousand published records (LPs and CDs) and original field recordings, to become one of the most important collections of world music recordings in Europe.

A first phase of cataloguing and digitisation was carried out between 1997 and 2000 with the support of Memoriav, an association for the preservation of the Swiss audiovisual memory. From 2004 to 2011, a grant from the Loterie Romande were enable this work to be completed for the entire archive collection.

Three unpublished collections have recently joined the AIMPs: the Samuel Baud-Bovy collection, which includes more than 400 phonograms collected in Greece during the second half of the 20th century; the Paul Mattar collection, which includes about 80 hours of music from the countries of the Persian Gulf (Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain), recorded in 1978 and 1979; the Bernard Mondet collection, which includes more than 50 hours of music from West Africa, recorded at the end of the 1970s. These collections are currently being digitized and integrated into the MEG databases, thanks to the support of Memoriav and the work of the students of the Master's degree in ethnomusicology (Geneva and Neuchâtel University, Haute école de musique Genève).

 AIMP

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