Freetown Sound Lab

The Freetown Community Sound Lab wishes to document 45 field recordings of 1st person community narratives and to engage residents to be the authors of their own stories. This initiative will teach residents not only to capture their stories but will create a living sound capsule of cultural expression for years to come.

Maison Freetown’s Community Sound Lab wishes to encourage the idea that everyone’s story matters and to build connections. Valuable oral traditions such as storytelling, language-based narratives, songs and other expressions are vital to our Louisiana culture. These recordings will be collected at the digital lab housed within Lafayette’s cultural museum, Maison Creole de Freetown. These recordings will be made available to the public on an online platform.

These 1-minute audio snippets will act as a living historical record for future learning and heritage preservation. We wish to empower citizens to share their experiences and to make this information easily accessible for everyone to enjoy.

Through digital innovation, we aim to quickly gather stories of our culture bearers, especially our seniors and to help remedy a critical concern regarding the posterity of historical data of under-represented communities or marginalized people.

We hope the sound lab recordings will provide a comprehensive glimpse of our Lafayette neighbors, and highlight Acadiana’s unique community “voices” in perpetuity.