Digital Cultures in Western Africa: Music, Youth and Mediation – AFRINUM

AFRINUM aims at renewing the discourse about innovation in Western African societies through the lens of the popular music industry. We consider digital technology as a globalized tool vs a cultural artifact to reflect upon the many peculiarities that this tool takes and the values to which it refers. This digital music culture will be investigated within a large range of social, economic and political contexts to which this culture participates meanwhile contributes to transforming, producing or reifying.
This scientific research triangulates three axes. The first axis investigates music and audio production practices in the recording studio throughout the role of the arranger/sound engineer. We will then focus on the entrepreneurial and collaborative economic models that young musicians develop to keep the control of their production, distribution, and broadcast, thus freeing themselves from the hierarchy of the Elders. Eventually, the third axis will examine how music enables new social relationships amongst individuals, groups, and identities, in a digital era that coincides with cultural marketing, that reduces the impact of the politics, and that benefits to a liberal economic paradigm with the actor-producer on the one hand and the individual-consumer on the other hand.
To carry out this project, an interdisciplinary team of 14 researchers, 2 post-doc and 10 students (Master and PhD candidates) in Social Sciences and in Audio Engineering Science will conduct field surveys in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali and Senegal. The project’s regional dimension will allow experts to identify national specificities and to apprehend knowledge transfer across countries. The collected corpus will be indexed, treated and stored on a TGIR Huma-Num server in a secured and long-term compatible format to facilitate comparative analyses within the team as well as further data exploitation. Also, the geomatics department of EHESS will visually represent this database in a series of physical and semantic maps (data papers).
Findings will contribute to the academic sphere through 1°) Creating a corpus with original data about an African region that has received scant attention; 2°) Strengthening North-South collaborations thanks to a partnership with LMI MaCoTer (IRD); 3°) Developing a French-speaking scientific community in the emergent field of Digital Studies and 4°) Designing a new theoretical and methodological framework at the intersection of Social Sciences and Digital Humanities. To do so, AFRINUM will organize several scientific international events and a series of collective open-access publications. The impact on knowledge transfer will be significant, with the involvement of several PhD candidates and graduate students in the research process, and with the creation of seminars. AFRINUM’s outcomes will also provide West-African music industry professionals and economists with useful updated information. Finally, special attention will be given to disseminate findings to the general and non-specialized audience, through the organization of conferences-debates in the 4 African countries of the project, the production of a documentary film (52’), short video documentaries that will present Science in action, and radio podcasts in partnership with RFI Labo.
The necessary budget to complete this project within a 48-month period (2020-2023) is estimated as 375 079€. It includes: 1°) fieldwork residencies, a team seminar and scientific events; 2°) IT and audiovisual equipment to collect data; 3°) CDD contracts (2 post-doctoral contracts, 6 graduate internships, 5 doctoral sessions) ; and 4°) services (database management, translation, reviewing).
Keywords: popular music; digital audio knowledge; cultural entrepreneurship ; cultural mediation; digital studies; globalization ; Western Africa.
Partners: Centre G. Simmel (UMR 8131 EHESS-CNRS) ; LMI MaCoTer (Unité 243 IRD) ; University of Lethbridge (Faculty of Fine Arts) on their own funds.