Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation
The Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to music studies. Founded in 2016 by the music scholar and writer Stephanus Muller, the institute provides supervision to postgraduate fellows from a variety of disciplines and functions as an independent research hub in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Its mission is to create an institutional space for scholars and artists that encourages experimentation and risk taking. AOI's community include postgraduate and postdoctoral fellows, extraordinary professors, research associates, composers, performers, sonic residents, archival and heritage practitioners and international partners. History AOI represents an institutional development of a research-based archive project aimed at collecting and preserving the collections of South African musicians and music scholars: the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University founded and headed by Stephanus Muller from 2005 to 2015. By 2015, DOMUS had acquired more than seventy collections that had served as a basis for articles in periodicals, conference papers, postgraduate theses, film screenings, recordings and performances. The archive thus played an important role in contributing to South African heritage and shaping debates on music in South Africa. Due to the scale of its acquisitions