Audemars Piguet supports the Montreux Jazz Lab V2

How can we bring to life a musical heritage now preserved in a digital format? How does this newly digitised heritage change our perception of the past? And what new cultural perspectives does it open?

An interdisciplinary research project by the EPFL + ECAL Lab, Metamedia Center and the ALICE laboratory set out to address these questions.

It all began when Audemars Piguet joined forces with Montreux Sounds and the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to digitise, restore and preserve the treasured archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival. The tremendous collection comprises thousands of hours of recordings by the finest musicians on the planet. It is the first audiovisual library to have earned the accolade of UNESCO Memory of the World. The project was inspired by the work of Claude Nobs, founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Work to preserve this legacy began in 2008 and is almost complete. Over the years the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival have taken many different formats. All the master copies have now been digitised and work on the original tapes will be finished by the end of the summer. We can now make full use of this heritage for research purposes. In the past eight years, more than 11,000 hours of video recordings (in HD since 1991) and 6,000 hours of high-quality audio recordings have been preserved in uncompressed digital formats utilizing the very latest technology. Since 2010, this unique collection has used as a database for a number of research projects at EPFL.

The new facility known as Montreux Heritage Lab V2 will be open to the public in the future EPFL Montreux Jazz Café from September. It includes the visual display of a large part of the archives, the capacity to host twenty persons and a very strong sensation of total immersion.

Audemars Piguet, the Loterie Romande and the Ernest Göhner Foundation, together with external technology partners such as HGST, have been supporting this project from the time when work on digitisation of the archives first began.

August 18, 2016