New online Archive of Indian Music

The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) formally launches today.

New sound archive collates 100-year-old voices from India

"New Delhi: Mahatma Gandhi's speech caught on gramophone during his 1931 visit to England now shares space with classical music legend M S Subhalakshmi's song, recorded when she was just nine, in a new virtual archive."

"The Archive of Indian Music (AIM), set to be formally launched on July 30, is an online compilation of vintage gramaphonic records of speeches, songs, plays etc dating as far back as 1902."

"This is a private initiative, a non profit trust where we source oldest rarest gramophone records like old ghazals, speeches of leaders, theatre recordings, folk music etc and digitise it for free access by laymen," Vikram Sampath, founder AIM said.

Sampath, an engineer, historian, author and musician from Bangalore has till date digitised 1000 clips from a collection of 12,000 gramaphone recordings and a total of 200 artists on the site, a pilot project that began in May this year.

"We have an ambitious target of taking it up to one lakh clips in the next five years," says Sampath.

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