Iranian music from the 20th century is being digitized
According to the German Cultural Information Center (KIZ), a cooperation between the University of Hildesheim and Iran to preserve historical music collections is being expanded. Around 16,000 records and tapes from the 1950s onwards are to be digitized.
In the two years of coordination to date, the digitization of old Iranian shellac records from the National Sound Archive of the Music Museum of Iran has begun, writes the KIZ, and now, according to Raimund Vogels, the director of the Hildesheim Centre for World Music, the collections from the second half of the 20th century are to be tackled.
The digital copies are to be made available worldwide. In addition, Iranian scientists are to be trained to such an extent that they will be able to document the current Iranian music scene themselves.
The project came about by chance two years ago. Specialists from Hildesheim were processing audio documents in Egypt. In the process, an Iranian doing his doctorate in Hildesheim remembered the record collection in Tehran. The first step was to clean and digitize 3,000 shellac records dating from 1906 to 1932.
