Sympathetic Resonances
An online platform for documenting, exploring, and learning mbira music.
Interactive transcriptions
Edit, play back, and watch mbira scores right in your web browser:
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News
Animated Mbira
6/2020 Animated visualization of mbira dzavadzimu and matepe scores.Art of Mbira notations
4/2020 New notations available to facilitate entering scores from Paul Berliner and Cosmas Magaya's book The Art of Mbira.
Learn to Play Mbira (with Forward Kwenda)
Fungai Gahadzikwa Mbira Song Book 1
8/2019
As a convenience for his customers, Andy Fowler of mbiramagic.com
started hosting transcriptions from his books on SR.
Shortcut to access this website
5/2019 http://symres.org now forwards to https://sympathetic-resonances.org/.
Matepe Music in Germany
4/2019 In March 2019, Stefan Franke of Sympathetic Resonances had the pleasure of hosting The Zonke Family of matepe players at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Tuning repository
Currently, 30 sampled tunings of 5 types of mbira are available.
Explore the wonderful diversity of historical and contemporary scales, and use them for tuning your own instruments.
Archives accessible
In 2017, we started a project at the International Library of African Music (ILAM) to make the great variety of mbiras and tunings in the Tracey Instrument Collection, as well as Andrew Tracey's extensive personal archive of transcriptions audible and accessible to the world.
This site also hosts transcriptions from a number of academic publications, e.g. by Andrew Tracey and Paul Berliner, making those more approachable to non-players.
Your personal library
Sign up to access all public content, and to start a personal archive of transcriptions. It is, and will always be, free of charge.
Everything you create is private, unless you decide to individually share it with other users.
As of today, about 300 registered users have created more than 750 transcriptions (80+ being public).
Learning & Inspiration
Use the public material as a starting point for learning traditional repertoire.
You can use the computer-generated playback for rehearsal at any tempo, and to practice the intricate interlocking between multiple parts.
As a seasoned player, get inspiration from tools to transpose and transform pieces, create variations, or compose new ones. You may also translate scores across instrument types.
Mission & Values
This project wants to contribute to the preservation (and expansion) of diversity of mbira music, with a special focus on marginalized traditional instrument types.
It does so by employing digital technology to make knowledge as accessible as possible, and to connect people. Approaching cultural heritage sensitively and sensibly, it maintains a long-term perspective - considering the next generations of players as well as the economic basis of culture bearers who teach this knowledge in the present.