ATTA is following Singing Wells News
…operating in the East African counties we are visiting during our field recording trips. I met Nigel Vere Nicoll, Chief Executive of the African Travel & Tourism Association and explained a little about Singing Wells and our aims to record and celebrate the cultural music heritage of East Africa. It seems Nigel liked what I told him! Operations Manager Lina Vaiksnoriene has been in touch and ATTA are now following our progress on our website and F…
A day in the field with Singing Wells News
…MacBook Pro 2 MOTU Traveler MK3 Audio Interface 4 Headphone amps 8 Sony MDR-V600 headphones 2 Shure mics & stands 2 Rode Lavalier omni-directional mics 2 Rode NTG-1 condenser Shotgun mics 1 Matched Pair of AKG C414 XL Microphones 1 Matched Pair of Rode NT5 Microphones2 Rode professional boom pole 1 K&M telescopic mic stand/boom 1 Canon EOS 7D 1 Canon EOS 60D 1 Canon EOS 5D 1 LED video camera lights 1 Flip HD video camera ThinkTank sun screens (for…
Northern Uganda: Day 1 – Entebbe to Gulu Story
…ear, and the architecture spells it out. Ultimately we all made it to super-market where we loaded up with money, mobile phone cards and other sundries and headed out. The William car stopped to pick up Akello, a lovely Ugandan singer/songwriter, who is joining the group as our Influences artist. The Emmanuel car headed into Kampala to pick up our press badges. We then headed off to Gulu at around 2PM (yes, we tend to spend a lot of time getting m…
The Tribal and Musical Structure of East Africa – Worldmap Research News
…nging Wells when I began work in the summer of 2012. The Virtue Foundation – Ghana – Yellow Fever Immunisation Why do you think it is the best way to display data? When displaying data it’s no secret that people often understand it better when it’s interesting visually; this is why we often use charts and diagrams rather than bodies of text nowadays. Most people’s brains aren’t able to see patterns in data easily, especially when the data set is h…
Singing Wells – Origins News
…d features audio tracks and videos of the songs and dances that we have recorded along the way. Two final words: influences and origins. When we first set out the aims for Singing Wells, we realized that we couldn’t just be fossil collectors, finding and cataloging music that will soon die out, leaving videos and songs in the archives. We also had to work to make this music relevant and important to contemporary artists. A key part of a field visi…
Bill Odidi reporting on Singing Wells from London News
…blished in Business Daily Africa: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Where+the+world+got+real+flavour+of+Kenya+in+London/-/1248928/1480860/-/djb5mf/-/index.html Photos from Kenya House …
How to Map 3: Prepare Your Data News
…you some random data. Select CSV (basically Excel) as your Result Type and number range as your Data Type. When we downloaded the country outline of the UK, we downloaded three shapefiles of different administrative levels, called 0, 1 and 2. Administrative level 0 is the outline of the whole of the UK. Administrative level 1 is the outline of the countries within the UK – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Administrative level 2 is th…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…y of locusts waiting for us in our rooms…. THURSDAY Today we all have a lie-in as we are recording at the hotel all day – the groups are coming to us. So breakfast is at 8 (much talk about the locust invasion – sounds like Jimmy suffered the biggest attack) and the studio is set-up for a 9.00am start. Things run a little late (we’re becoming accustomed to delays) as we wait for people to arrive and when they do we start another full day of recordi…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…is.org/. To get your spatial data you click on Free Spatial Data in the top-right corner. On the Free Spatial Data page click on country level data. On the Download Data by Country page, select the country you need and make sure the Subject is Administrative areas. There is other data available for free download from this page, such as elevation and population density, but for our purposes we’re only interested in administrative areas, i.e. the re…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…g to smoke near the back door of the plane while we were refueling. Nice. 1-2-3 Clap: We have three cameras and 6 mics. When we mix a DVD, all those elements needs to be synched up, which is quite a complex operation. An easy way to help is to have a ‘clap’ at the beginning of the take so that Pato can line up the three videos and audio. We talk to the musical groups and explain that Pato will say “1, 2, 3” and then clap. They are then able to sta…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…inyo. Here, they put down their track. Not at all phased by the use of headphones and mics, they take everything in there stride, performing a number of takes as the song develops. We start by giving them a simple click to follow the beat but quickly realised that their tempos are far more subtle than this. Francis comes back to set the rhythm with their natural clapping and it suddenly all came together again. Once we have the female vocals recor…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…mittee for Spot light and he would go out to select folks for the later recordings but the recording happened at the Go Down Arts Centre. The Spot Light series brought up the whole richness of Kenyan music. Some of the groups were very large, but because of budgets we could only bring a small number. We had good production but we couldn’t get the whole band in their element . Gargar was an example. Huge women’s group with lots of culture things –…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival 2011 News
…inging wells’. When Steve Kivutia (Ketebul Music) presented the idea of recording music at the Festival to the AMF, it seemed a perfect fit with the objectives of the Singing Wells project and the trustees were happy to approve a grant to cover the costs of travelling to the Festival with the new mobile recording equipment. The main purpose for the Festival, which is hosted by the German Embassy in Nairobi and the National Museums of Kenya, is to…
More Ketebul voices…Steve reports from the field News
…e noise. We found a spot downwind behind some bushes, and Maddo parked car number 02 in between our recording station and Jenny, to try and break the path of the sound. Jimmy was concerned about the amount of human traffic we had already attracted. There were kids everywhere and we could see people coming down into the river bed from the village up above in droves. We set up quickly on the back of car number one, it was now early evening and the s…