From critical fieldwork to sustainable impact for West African sound professionals

Since the emergence of the world music industry in the 1980s, stars from French-speaking West Africa such as Alpha Blondy, Youssou N'Dour and Oumou Sangaré have strongly influenced global music production. Nevertheless, our critical ethnographies in West African recording studios show that the local sound professionals who have played a crucial role in the success of these stars and development of new talents have rarely been credited on international releases. This new project will fund the assistantship of one BAME PGR student, generate impact from curating video captures of previous audio workshops, and cover the fees of training sessions in Bamako to make our approach to decolonising research methods more sustainable while pursuing two objectives co-created with fieldwork participants: to empower emerging West African sound professionals through more access to audio training, and to give more international visibility to established West African sound professionals through knowledge exchange.
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