About Ün

Ün means voice. The archive was started with the Conservatory in 1967 to keep the voices of people who sang at home.

The Conservatory grew out of the Talas music school of 1936. Its sound archive began with one tape recorder and Aigul Choro kyzy’s first summer on the road, and it never stopped recording, not in 1992 and not in the years after. Today it holds 1,284 catalogued recordings on about 1,900 reels of quarter-inch tape and 400 digital tapes, made in 139 places by 412 singers and players.

In 2019 the Körköm Foundation began to pay for the digitising of the reels, two machines and two people, and for this website. By the end of 2026 about half of the reels are digitised. The first volumes go online as the singers’ families agree.

The archive helped make the record Suusamyr Koshoktoru (2015), Cholpon Kasym kyzy’s laments recorded at her home.

People

Keeper: Kubanychbek Asanov. Sound engineer: Daniyar Toktogulov. Cataloguer: Elmira Sydykova. With the third-year students of the folk music faculty.

The volumes

I	Epic	212
II	Laments	248
III	Herding and work songs	231
IV	Longing and the toi	197
V	Instrumental	176
VI	Children's	132
VII	Hymns in three voices	88

The numbering follows the six volumes of Oral Folk Art of Irad where it can. Volume VII, the hymns, was added in 1993.