Ana Flávia Miguel, University of Aveiro/INET

Keywords: Soma Project; Ethnomusicology; Research practices; Archives; Social Memory

The SOMA project aims to construct a physical and digital space for memory, dedicated to the music and sounds of the region of Aveiro while simultaneously promoting objectives for social innovation and transformation and objectives
of academic innovation and production. This living laboratory is being collectively constructed and shared with the community alongside academic researchers, with the aim of ensuring that research and development includes and benefits the local community. This project involves a transdisciplinary team comprising ethnomusicologists, archivists, designers, information technicians, sound engineers, music producers and members of the non-academic community.
Sound is increasingly valued as patrimony and as a repository for memory, an aspect that was internationally established with the promotion of a variety of practices that include music and sound in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The various projects that are now dedicated to mapping the sounds of cities and to reconstructing soundscapes associated with nature or those manipulated by human action such as industrial spaces are relevant examples of the recognition of sound as a significant feature of people’s lives. The relation between sound and memory, and in particular with collective memory as an expression of social relations and the resulting realities, is one of the main arguments for its recognition as archive material, for its inclusion as museological narrative or for its consideration as a decisive factor in individuals identification with their cultural heritage.
In the era of digital humanities, the first historical sound archives that were established in the beginning of the 20th century in Europe like the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv (1898) or the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (1900) are giving way to digital and open access archives, organized through digital networks. Among the latter is the recently released Europeana Sounds which between February 2014 and January 2017, increased its storage from 505,257 audio recordings to one million, and since 1987, the Smithsonian Folkways, whose mission is recording, archiving, and distributing the world’s music. According to its Director Huib Schippers, while musics have always emerged and disappeared through changing tastes or circumstances, some small musics are being disappeared by non-musical influences and powers. That is causing a substantial reduction in the diversity of music we can access and enjoy now, and even more so in the future (Schippers 2017).
In fact, sound and music are increasingly valued as patrimony and as a repository for social memory, an aspect that was internationally established with the promotion of a variety of practices that include music and sound in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO 2003). The relation between sound and memory, and in particular with collective and social memory as an expression of social relations and the resulting realities, is one of the main arguments for its recognition as archive material, for its inclusion as museological narrative or for its consideration as
a decisive factor in individuals identification with their cultural heritage (ABREU, Regina e CHAGAS, Mário 2009).
On the other hand, social memory studies have improved in the last 30 years and music and sound were increasingly included as important ingredients for the subject. When the concept of memory became independent from psychology it was applied firstly to collective memory (Halswachs 1968) and then to social memory while concentrated in body practices (Connerton, Paul 1989), in the construction of lieux de memoire (Nora 1989) or in social reproduction (Burke 1989), among other processes.
This is the concept related to the SOMA project. We do not construct a static sound and music archive but a place where the archive would represent an unfinished knowledge (García 2011), produced collectively by academics and the local community.
In addition, a previous project using shared research practices in ethnomusicology (Sardo 2018, Miguel 2016) for the construction of a sound archive in a neighbourhood of Cape-Verdean migrants in Lisbon, was already carried out by some of the team members. The project, called Skopeofonia, led to the construction of a local sound archive with the participation of the local community (young and unemployed musicians) and is being used as a repository for local memory and for creative projects.
The development of this project was a unique experience in the field of research in Ethnomusicology in Portugal, because it offered innovative possibilities in the methodological domain, especially in the application of shared research practices. It was, eventually, another way of looking at work on music and the consequences that can result from the dialogue between the academy and the non-academic spaces targeted by research projects. This project was very much inspired by the experience of Musicultura, a research group created in the favela of Maré in 2003, which has been nourishing a sound archive for and with the community by using participative research-action as the main methodological tool for a Do It Yourself local sound archive (Araujo 2008, Grupo Musicultura 2011).
After the experience of Skopeofonia we sustain that using action-research method is a very positive way to rethink the role of human and social sciences and ethnomusicology in particular. We apply the suggestions proposed by Samuel Araújo such as: both native and academic researchers (subject positions sometimes merged in one single individual) negotiate from the start the research focuses and goals, as well as the nature of the data to be gathered, the type of reflection they require, natives will both gather and interpret the data, non-academic natives and academics of different social origins develop reflections on the dialoguing process that permeates the research, and, new focuses arisen in this reflection open new research interests and suggest new forms of diffusion beyond the conventional ones (Araújo 2008:15).
In this sense, we created a research group composed of academic researchers (with interest and experience within participative research methodology) and residents of the community who are retired.
In this paper I intend to 1) make a balance of the project, highlighting the principal challenges and 2) discuss the two main goals of the SOMA Project. One is the construction a physical and digital space for memory, dedicated to the music and sounds of the region of Aveiro. The other is promotion of social innovation and transformation through the use of shared research practices in human sciences and in ethnomusicology in particular.

Bibliography

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(http://www.periodicos.ufop.br/pp/index.php/raf/article/view/596/552)

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Sardo, Susana (2018) “Shared Research Practices on and about music: toward decolonizing colonial ethnomusicology”. In Martí, Josep and Sara Revilla (eds) Making Music, Making Society. Cambridge: Cambridge SchollarsPublishing.

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