Grantee Update: Bomas of Kenya, The SampleBar Kenya Project
Our grantees have been hard at work these past few months and The SampleBar Kenya team, in particular, has been traversing the country in pursuit of various sounds from different regions.
The SampleBar Kenya project is an interactive ethnomusicological exhibit that aims to preserve and showcase Kenya’s cultural heritage through digitized music recordings. The need to archive, document and exhibit the sounds and melodies grows in urgency as the diversity of Kenyan traditional instruments face extinction.
SampleBar Kenya’s ongoing work consists of research and fieldwork, as well as studio recordings of a variety of traditional music. The content developed as a result of this work aims to appropriately capture and document the social and cultural aspects of the people, instruments and musical styles. The team is also collecting musical instruments to compliment the digital exhibit with actual physical components.
The final project objective is to install a permanent exhibit at the Bomas of Kenya with a total of 8 SampleBar tables that cover the Central, Coast, Eastern, North Eastern, Nyanza, Rift Valley, Western Kenya and Nairobi city regions. The Nairobi city table will represent the blending cultures, showcase the contemporary development of Kenya’s musical identity, and feature popular genres and instruments.
So far, the project is off to a great start with musical collections from the Nyanza, Eastern, Western and Central regions of Kenya. Come with us behind the scenes to see what it takes to source, record and capture authentic traditional Kenyan music courtesy of The SampleBar!
More updates on their project progress will be updated here so stay tuned! You can follow The SampleBar on their various social media channels: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
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Grantee Events: Events 2022/ 2023