Funding awarded from the RSE for vital sound archive collaboration in Scotland
Dr Frances Wilkins, Senior Lecturer in ethnomusicology at The Elphinstone Institute, alongside Prof Duncan MacLeod (Glasgow School of Art) and Flòraidh Forrest (Tobar and Dualchais) were recently awarded research funding through an RSE Spring Collaboration Grant. The project, titled 'The Carrying Stream: Activating Scotland’s Sound Archives through Creative Transmission', will enable vital collaboration between academics, sound archivists and arts practitioners in Scotland.
Scotland’s sound archives are among the nation’s most significant cultural resources, holding rich recordings of story, song, oral history, oral tradition, language, and everyday life that preserve a vital record of Scotland’s intangible cultural heritage (ICH). They also contain extensive material in Scots and Gàidhlig, making them an important resource for the cultural memory, knowledge, and traditions carried through these minoritised languages. This project will establish a national interdisciplinary research network to examine how these archives might be more effectively connected to communities, creative practitioners, and partner organisations. Bringing together archivists, artists, musicians, curators, and researchers, it will explore how creative practice, emergent technologies, and decolonial approaches such as rematriation can inform new models of access, engagement, and stewardship.
'The Carrying Stream' is an 18 month project which will commence in January 2027.