Where We Live: The Art of Field Recordings

Field recordings of traditional music and oral history have provided an important window into the past.  

Mystic Seaport has been collecting the stories of Connecticut’s dwindling fishing industry for exhibitions and books.  We’ll hear the voices of the men and women who keep alive our state’s only remaining commercial fishing fleet, and hear how Calabretta gathers these stories.  

Also, the Yale Library has announced that it will be providing online access to hundreds of hours of field recordings from Guinea in Africa.  These field recordings are the most significant body of audio historical data on the indigenous history and culture of theses coastal villages in Guinea between 1958 and 1984.

We’ll talk to two experts about what these recordings reveal, and about the deep cultural and musical traditions of this fertile region.