by Martina Fuchs
MONTREUX, Switzerland, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, famous for its iconic live music performances since 1967, is keeping its musical heritage and audio-visual collection alive through digitization.
The collections, which began with the first festival in 1967, include both video and multitrack audio formats. To date, over 6,000 concerts have been recorded, amassing more than 11,000 hours of video and 6,000 hours of audio. Additionally, 200,000 professional photographs have been digitized.
According to the Claude Nobs Foundation, this equals 14,000 magnetic tapes, weighing 30 tons and occupying 600 meters of shelves, with 12 PetaBytes of storage for all copies.
"We have digitized everything during nearly 15 years," Alain Dufaux, operational director of the Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC) at the world-renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), told Xinhua during the 58th edition which is running from July 5 to 20.
"Now our students and professors can use the archives in their research in many fields, such as audio processing, acoustics, machine learning, neuroscience, musicology, or museology."
In partnership with the Claude Nobs Foundation and other sponsors, EPFL is in charge of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project to digitize and enrich the recordings, as well as to safeguard their long-term preservation.
In 2013, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) inscribed the Montreux Jazz Festival audio and visual collection in its international Memory of the World Register, the documentary equivalent of "World Heritage."
Swiss music promoter Claude Nobs who died in 2013 founded the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967 and built it into an international festival and events platform for music lovers.
The festival will travel to China for the third time in the fall and take place in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, from Oct. 25 to 27 under the Montreux Jazz Festival China's theme "When West Meets East." ■
