Inetmoz – a Database for the Musical Heritage of Mozambique

The project Timbila, Makwayela and Marrabenta: one century of musical representation of Mozambique aims to preserve the cultural heritage of musical experience in Mozambique in the twentieth century, as well as its connections with Portugal. The evolution of the Mozambican musical experience throughout the twentieth century was recorded by the phonographic industry as well as radio stations. However, the advent of the Digital Age has rendered many of the technologies used obsolete, making contemporary access to these sources difficult. InetMoz, the database of the project that we present here, centered on the organization, preservation and study of phonograms, culminates in a creation that is both academic and intuitive. It serves to return the music to the community, compiling and relating data and also providing access to recordings in mp3 format. The preservation and digitization of magnetic tapes, discs and bibliography for the database follows international norms such as those outlined in I.A.S.A. TC-04. The transcription into the digital domain is complex due to the diversity of magnetic carriers of video and sound in the process. The scanned contents, in addition to being available in the InetMoz database (https://goo.gl/YAoL1x), are available in uncompressed formats – wave and tiff – for long term archive, in various locations.