Indian music finds new home online

The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) wears its ambition on its record-sleeve. The newest baby of Vikram Sampath, best known for his 2010 biography of Gauhar Jaan, the subcontinent’s first commercial recording artiste, the portal looks to be the largest digitized repository of out-of-copyright recordings by Indian gramophone artistes. With 2,000 recordings (dating currently between 1902 and 1952) already available on the site and up to 20 additions daily, the spread justifies the acronym.

“While researching the life of Gauhar Jaan, I had to look for her music—available in shellac records—in the by-lanes of Kolkata and Mumbai. I got many of her records, but I also picked up many other unknown artistes, paying up to Rs.900 for 3 minutes of music,” says Sampath, 32. “Soon after the publication of My Name Is Gauhar Jaan!, I went on a fellowship to the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, where I researched early gramophone recordings of Indian music. In London, Vienna, Berlin, all of which boast of excellent audio-history libraries, I repeatedly faced the question: Doesn’t India have a sound archive?”

On his return to India, Sampath received an invitation to 10, Janpath. “(Congress chief) Sonia Gandhi had read Gauhar Jaanand wanted to meet me. I wondered what we could talk about, and so broached on the subject of a music archive, since the state was a natural stakeholder,” Sampath smiles disarmingly. However, after one year of paper-pushing between Akademis and ministries, the project was still to take off. A chance encounter with then Infosys director T.V. Mohandas Pai in 2011 persuaded Sampath to go private, form his own not-for-profit trust, use Pai’s generous seed fund for sophisticated cleaning and conversion equipment, employ a single audio engineer and, finally, in December, go live at Archiveofindianmusic.org.

Still a work-in-progress, the archives feature a good mix of Carnatic luminaries (M.S. Subbulakshmi, K.B. Sundarambal, Mysore Vasudevachar), alongside some Hindustani artistes (Rasoolan Bai, ustad Imdad Khan), film star-singers (M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar), political leaders (Gandhi), litterateurs (Rabindranath Tagore), the occasional Manna Dey and K.L. Saigal and the Visva-Bharati university chorus (in a 1912 recording of the complete Jana-Gana-Mana).

Many of the pieces have been uploaded from Sampath’s own collection, but the nine AIM trustees—musicians, record-collectors, aficionados—now help him track down old and rare records. Once procured, the records are put through a vacuum-driven master-cleaner, amplified on a high-fidelity player, converted into a digitized format and uploaded to the site.

While the artistes are listed alphabetically, there is little cross-indexing and dating of the material. So, at the moment, navigating the site is a matter of choosing an artiste and selecting a piece to listen to. The uploading of artistes is dictated by popularity—some tracks have received up to 400 plays in the two months the site has been live—but Sampath hopes that apart from the casual listener or history buff, the portal will work as a lively interactive site for researchers and students of music, with user-generated content and talk-through guides.

While the archives are accessible to all at the moment at  Archiveofindianmusic.org , a registration-and-payment process will be introduced soon.

source: http://www.livemint.com / & Wall Street Journal / Home> Lounge / by Sumana Mukherjee / Friday, January 11th, 2013