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Sound Archives

From 1944 to 1958, the Romanian musicologist Constantin Brăiloiu amassed sound recordings from the five continents, using the records he had made in Romania, Switzerland and other countries as the core of the Genevan archives, known as the Archives internationales de musique populaire (AIMP). His aim was to compare music from all over the world and publish its various expressions in the Collection Universelle de Musique Populaire (forty 78 records, 1951-1958). The archives now hold nearly 16,000 hours of recorded music. They let us hear the voices of the instruments and explore the history of the publication of world music.

Collecting and recording

Because of the technical difficulty of recording music in the field and also because of the compartmentalisation of the institutions dedicated respectively to building up ethnographic collections and carrying out anthropological research, few musical instruments were collected before the 1950s, although recordings of their musical repertory were made at the time. The configuration of the collections of musical instruments and sound archives reflects this work method, in which the topics of observation were assigned to different people.

The establishment of museum laboratories in the 1960s radically transformed the museum collections, which have been enriched by multiple audiovisual documents.

Missions to Nepal

In 1952, a major Genevan scientific mission was sent to Nepal. Marguerite Lobsiger-Dellenbach, then director of the MEG, took an active part in it, bringing many objects and major scientific documentation back to the museum, including several sets of musical instruments along with photographs and about fourteen hours of musical recordings. Some twenty years later, this collection was further enriched (fifteen instruments and over fifteen hours of music) by Laurent Aubert, then a student in ethnomusicology. So Nepal, and more particularly the Newar people of the Kathmandu valley, is a special field for the MEG. The music collection built up by its researchers over the years is one of the best documented in the museum.