Digitization of the Ethnomusicological Sound Archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (online)

Digitization of the Ethnomusicological Sound Archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa is a music online project founded in Brussels, Belgium. The project is a joint-effort of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Université Libre de Bruxelles and Ghent University.

The sound archive of the department of Ethnomusicology of the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren (Belgium) contains a collection of sound recordings of traditional music from Central Africa whose focus is on countries such as Congo and Rwanda. They include about 3,000 hours of music recordings, the oldest dating back to 1910.

The archive’s contents are in various formats including Edison cylinders, Sonofil wire, magnetic tapes, audiocassettes, disks, CDs, metadata (paper files) and contextual data such as photographs, films, videos, books, and other documents.

The collection was started during the colonial era of the Belgian Kingdom in Central Africa. The RMCA collection is an important part of the music memory of Central Africa in terms of size, documentation and music quality.

The project’s goal is to digitize the entire ethnomusicological sound archive of the RMCA.