A year ago, the Malta Music Memory Project (M3P) was launched with several aims in mind, but primarily to build a collaborative multimedia database of Maltese music and associated arts.
Founded by Toni Sant and run by the non-profit voluntary organisation M3P Foundation, the project has been steadily growing as much in the number of entries as it has in number of registered users and contributors, although there is still much to be done. But why is M3P’s work so important?
Despite the abundance of activities, bands and artists keeping the Maltese music scene alive, there has been no cohesive collection of recordings by local bands and artists throughout the past decades.
This makes it difficult to document the history of the Maltese music scene, and is one of the M3P project’s foremost priorities.
Most may assume our radio stations probably have the songs in their libraries, but what of the underground scenes that don’t get aired on the local airwaves too often, if at all?
Another common assumption is that the artists themselves will have recordings of the songs that the bands they play in (or used to), and perhaps a good number of them do.
Hard as it may be to believe, however, there are several artists who lose or misplace their band’s recordings, especially when that band has ceased to exist and the artists have moved on.
There are artists who don’t keep the recordings tucked away in some drawer and who may even upload them on the internet, but imagine the scenario: a thousand or so musicians, each with a personal website hosted wherever, scattered all over cyberspace.
How could someone ever trace them all down, unless there was a place specifically set up to provide the space and the place?
M3P is that place; it offers that space for free, and every individual musician, songwriter, band manager, event promoter, fan, roadie or whatever, can contribute and share their experience of a particular event or the history of the bands that have, through their very existence, helped shape and make the Maltese music scene what it is today.
If you have got a story related to the Maltese music scene – past or present – to tell, the M3P website is the place you should be telling it.
Asked to comment on the first anniversary since M3P was launched during last year’s Notte Bianca, Sant said:
“Now we’ve gone through a whole year’s worth of activities, we have an initial sense of what can and can’t work with this project. We clearly need to focus more on gathering oral histories, particularly from aging or neglected musicians and artists, as well as develop ways for others to collaborate on the M3P more generally.
“To this end we’re hoping to do some basic fundraising to ensure we can build a solid infrastructure of resources (both human and technical) on which to continue developing the M3P.”
In 2010/11, such activities were supported by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts’ Malta Arts Fund and the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media (UK), but to sustain this type of activity for years to come, the M3P Foundation is now looking at other sources to support the project into developing beyond the initial activities.
In fact, the foundation’s conference at St James Cavalier last June focused on the theme, ‘Ensuring Longevity for Collaborative Online Memory Projects’.
www.m3p.com.mt