External Site: Reel to Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum[info]
This website is one of the outcomes of a project which set out to make available to the widest possible audience the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University’s Museum of Anthropology and World Archaeology. The project has made available online a broad selection of the main ethnographic (field) sound collections held by the Museum. These include selections from the Edward Evans-Pritchard collection of recordings from made in Zandeland in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930, and recordings of the Bayaka tribe in the Central African Republic, made by pioneering ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno. In addition to the recordings themselves (which are hosted on SoundCloud), a useful array of contextual resources is available, including video interviews with a number of leading ethnomusicologists, sound curators, audio engineers, and other related experts, as well as talks from workshops which took place during the project programme, and stills and video clips made by Louis Sarno in the Central African Republic. In 2014 the Museum completed a major digitisation project on its film collections. Much of the material is unique and of significant historical importance, such as the films of Frederick Spencer Chapman made in Tibet, Greenland and Africa, Beatrice Blackwood in Papua New Guinea and Ursula Graham Bower in India.