MONTREUX SOUNDS

ABOUT

Montreux Sounds, Founded in 1973 by Claude Nobs and owned today by Thierry Amsallem, acquired all productions/coproductions of the Montreux Jazz Festival until 2013 which became one of the World’s largest private collection of “live” music recordings – all of which was recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland) since 1967. Having started with jazz in the early days, over the years, the collection has grown and enriched itself with new genres of music ranging from blues and rock, to rap, soul, Latin and many more. 

In 2007, Montreux Sounds joined forces with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) to create a unique, first of its kind, high resolution digital archive of the Festival. Considered both as an educational tool and research infrastructure, this audio-visual heritage has become a unique platform for students and researchers to innovate in fields such as acoustics, data science, archiving, musicology, museology, or neurosciences. Driven by the EPFL Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center, the “Montreux Jazz Digital Project” is an accelerator for innovation in technology, culture, social sciences and open science. Today the library has become one of the largest testimonies of live music in the World, with over 5,000 individual performances.  The collection is un-equaled and has a universal significance for current and future generations. As a result, in June 2013, it was inscribed to UNESCO’s international Memory of the World Register, the documentary equivalent of “World Heritage”.

Thierry Amsallem founded the Claude Nobs Foundation (public utility, independent entity) in 2014 to preserve and valorize the collection in partnership with EPFL.