ATTA is following Singing Wells News
…g and interested people who we can talk to about the project. Earlier this month I was their guest at the World Travel Market at Excel and I met representatives from a number of organisations and companies in the travel and tourism industry 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…
A day in the field with Singing Wells News
…the laptops) Various Canon zoom and fixed lenses Plus at least 9 Sandisk memory cards and 15 portable back-up drives and a lot of leads and cables! Having settled on our first location the video engineers set up their shots while the audio engineers set up the recording rigs. The video engineers are working with Canon digital SLR cameras. One camera is used as a main locked-off shot of the whole scene while the two other cameras concentrate on clo…
The Tribal and Musical Structure of East Africa – Worldmap Research News
…the basics, as we have, the broad tribal and musical structure of East Africa is there, now we can only add to it! There was also the difficulty of classification. There are hundreds of different language groups and dialects between tribes in East Africa, meaning that within the huge range of instruments there were also a number of different names for them. This became very interesting to discover however, and over time that information could gath…
Northern Uganda: Day 1 – Entebbe to Gulu Story
…ately 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 mobile phone cards!) and headed out on a 360 km…
Singing Wells – Origins News
…neer, Patrick Ondiek, adds, ‘I love producing the final videos and getting phone calls from my friends asking me ‘how did you find these musicians?’ I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of music, bringing these talented musicians to my Nairobi friends.’ We have developed a three year plan to record a wide selection of important tribal musicians in East Africa. We are recording music in Northern Uganda in Autumn 2012 and then we will travel to Tan…
Bill Odidi reporting on Singing Wells from London News
…are now based in the UK. They also had the chance to visit Kenya House in Stratford as a guest of our friends at the Kenya Tourist Board. Here’s Bill’s article published 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
…l of these points will be applicable, but here are some things you need to think about when preparing your data: The title of each column must not exceed 14 characters. The shorter the better. E.g. instead of ‘Number of Unicorns’, have ‘unic_no’. None of the cells of your Excel file can contain more than 256 characters. Make sure there are no hidden characters such as spaces or backspaces in any of the data cells. Anything upon which a join will b…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…me speed. We have to ask him to slow down a few times so the other vehicle can catch up. In the meantime, I have the camera in hand to capture the wonderful landscape of the Rwandan hills on our climb to the border. There are some prominent themes on the trip which I noted down later that evening: bustling towns, people walking everywhere, women in colourful kikoys, children playing at the roadside, motorbikes, push bikes, sacks of potatoes, lush…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…line of the United Kingdom. Click Download. This will download a .zip file called, in this case, GBR_adm.zip. Open it up and take a look. What you will see is a crazy number of files, none of which your computer seems to really recognise. Don’t panic. What you’re seeing is just a few shapefiles (remember shapefiles? No? Let me jog your memory). As we’re looking at the shapefiles in the C: drive rather than in ArcMap itself, you can see the six ind…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…lometres so far on African roads for Singing Wells. And we’ve observed Africans carry just about anything on their heads or their motorbikes – fruit of every type, doors, trees, chickens, etc… Our favourite, however, was to be greeted by a motor bike travelling directly towards us with a funeral casket on the ‘back seat.’ Given the safety of the roads, we praised the driver for ‘being prepared.’ ‘ Roadside Occupations: We can also divide the roads…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…tacular rain (which did not subside until the early hours of the following morning causing the power cut which lasted the same length of time). Their wait allowed us to capture some photos of their members which demonstrate wonderfully the age range across the group and the fact that music here in Africa is for the whole community, from the very young to their much respected elders. This lady was one of the principal dancers and she out performed…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…. But we’ve also been able to record with the artists, through Winyo, on a more modern sound.. We’ve done a very good job recording, especially day 2. We had no issue with equipment and the team was trained very quickly. I think the main area to improve is to emulate a studio even more, isolating certain sounds so that we can really capture individual vocalists and instruments. We did an amazing job of archiving the full performance, in video and…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival 2011 News
…‘overcome tribalism in the region and to promote peace and reconciliation among the local communities around Lake Turkana by giving them an opportunity for cross-cultural cooperation and exchange, both in the preparation and in the course of the Festival. During the three days Festival, representatives of the Rendille, El Molo, Pokot, Samburu, Turkana, Gabbra, Dassanech and Borana present their respective customs and living conditions, spectacular…
More Ketebul voices…Steve reports from the field News
…our people per car with Tabu on the wheel, Jimmy, Andy and Willie Bembe in car number 01, and Maddo on the wheel, Winyo, Pato and I in the air conditioned car number 02, which was equipped with a GPS unit courtesy of Maddo, the chairman or as he prefers to be called “The Leader and The Guide!” The Chairman and owner of GPS 4 and half hours and 322 km later, we made a stop in Voi town for lunch. Everyone had some food apart from Tabu. I have known…