While recovering from a motorcycle accident in 2010, Rebecca Corey was listening to CDs of old Tanzanian music given to her by a Tanzanian friend, Benson Rukantabula. Corey fell in love with the music, but the quality was not great.
She learned that nearly all Tanzanian music recorded between the early 1960s and mid-1980s were stored on reel-to-reel tapes that have never been professionally digitized. As a result, Corey and Benson founded the Tanzanian Heritage Project and are digitize the country’s tape-based music archive.
Using Prism Sound’s Lyra audio interface, along with the Studer A67 and Tandberg TD 20A tape recorders the THP, which is made up of music enthusiasts, not professionals, has been digitizing reel-to-reel archives of radio stations and private collections.
“We took on this project because we were music lovers who believed that this music needed to be preserved before it was too late,” said Corey. “So the fact that Lyra is easy to use and produces incredible quality sound has made us very satisfied with its performance so far.”
Corey expects the project to at least eight to 10 months of full-time work. Once the project is complete, Corey intends to make the digital copies available to music schools and art programs.
