2nd Workshop of the Working Group on Restitution and Repair | CRIA
Be-MUSIC - online sound archives and the intellectual property rights
Speakers: Sisa Calapi & Rémy Jadinon
Date: June 24
Time: 2–4 PM (GMT: Lisbon, PT)
Language: english
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Session Summary
Databases are fundamental cornerstones for research and understanding in the field of musical traditions. The Be-Music project will bring together the digitized music collections (photos, instruments, field photos, records, and sound recordings) housed at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren and the Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments (RMAH-MIM) into a new, multi-lingual information platform for musical heritage. One of the major challenges facing scientific institutions when putting intangible collections online is to establish good practice in terms of current law and ethics. The sound archives preserved in Belgium represent the musical heritage of the former Belgian colonies, the legitimacy of which in terms of ownership or representation is regularly contested.
In this presentation, we will address the methodological issues of copyright and intellectual property of sound archives with a view to decolonisation processes and the creation of a national platform using crowdsourcing tools. The aim is to question the notion of legal ownership of sound archives through the legal frameworks used by cultural institutions to put their collections online. We also want to look at the moral and/or emotional issues involved in (re)appropriating cultural heritage.
Sisa Calapi is currently the copyright manager for the sound archives of the AfricaMuseum. She specialised in the management of sound archives in ethnomusicology at the CREM (Centre for Research in Ethnomusicology: CNRS/Université Paris Nanterre), where she is completing her PhD. Since 2016, her research has focused on the politics of Kichwa music and dance in northern Ecuador.
Rémy Jadinon, Curator & Music Researcher, AfricaMuseum (Belgium), works in the field of African music, at the interface of anthropology and musicology. Since 2011, he is the curator of the musicological collections of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium). He conducts research in Central and East Africa on the contemporary aspects of traditional music and pays particular attention to the use of digital technologies in its production and circulation.
