Archiving of Music by Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri

NCPA HSBC Online Workshop

An NCPA Presentation

Supported by HSBC, India 

As music is primarily thought to be performed, listened to and enjoyed, many may ask a pertinent question: why archive music? Moreover, enabled by the rapid technological advancement today, recording, sharing and disseminating music has also become an increasingly integral part of the practice of music. In such a scenario, archives may seem irrelevant as there is so much content available on easily accessible platforms like YouTube.

This workshop is meant to provide an introduction to archiving of music, primarily the audiovisual archiving related to South Asia in general and India in particular. It will address fundamental issues like what archiving means, how we may go about it, the aspects to be considered and most importantly, the significance of archiving of music.

Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri has been the Director at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of Indian Studies for the last four decades. She has been active in holding training workshops in archiving and ethnomusicology, and has served as consultant with the WIPO Creative Heritage Project and with UNESCO for its cultural mapping project, and interactive museums.

Her major interests have been database applications, research archives and ethnomusicology, issues of Intellectual Property Rights and community archives. In these areas, she has presented research papers at many national and international venues and co-authored publications with renowned scholars. Her current projects include digitisation of legacy audio collections as well as a project on the ballad traditions of Manganiyar and Langa musicians in Western Rajasthan.

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