IASA 2018 Annual Conference

This paper reports on some of the results obtained during the documentation and audiovisual archiving project of Dagbon music-dance culture in the northern region of Ghana. We describe the digitisation and contextualisation of the data and meta data under the DEKKMMA-Project.
The aim of the project was to record, catalogue and map out a large portion of the not yet documented music-dance culture found in the traditional idiom of music making in Dagbon. By integrating this documentation project at the Africa Museum (RMCA) in Belgium through the DEKKMMA platform,  we made a wealth of unpublished material available online for researchers, institutes of learning and the general public. The documentation project is based on long-term fieldwork in the Northern Region of Ghana during the period 1999 – 2010. The audiovisual recordings during these annual field trips include ethnographic materials, artifacts, musical instruments, dance costumes, regalia used during music-dance performances, coming both from the rural areas and from “The Hiplife Zone”, the urban space in and around Tamale. Exemplifying the rich cultural heritage of contemporary Ghana and Dagbon music-dance tradition in particular, this audio-visual collection is not only catalogued and archived at the Ethnomusicological Archive of the RMCA in Tervuren, Belgium, but also locally at the Institute of African Studies University of Ghana, Legon, for perpetuity. The end of the paper presents a case study on how the Dagbon audiovisual collection is applied for new innovative ethnomusicological research and analyses at the University of Ghent, Belgium, in the idiom of embodied music interaction and African musicology.
https://www.ugent.be/lw/kunstwetenschappen/en/research-groups/musicology/ipem/finishedprojects/dekkma.htm
http://music.africamuseum.be/english/index.html