Music: Resources

A selection of digitized recordings from the British Library's collections; includes world music, popular music, classical music, oral histories, sound recording history, and more. NOTE: some recordings are only playable within the EU; check "Only recordings everyone can play" in the search box if you are located elsewhere.

The National Jukebox is a project to digitize a part of the Library of Congress's holdings in early sound recordings. From their website: "the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others."

The audio archives at the Internet Archive include the recordings of many contemporary composers as well as popular songs digitized from early 20th century 78 RPM records.

This is music you won't easily find anywhere else—except, perhaps in its region of origin.

"A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites."

"The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Grammy Foundation and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free."

From the About page: "The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place...to explore expressive patterns in...cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage....The Global Jukebox makes available to the general public, scholars and scientists all of the data and many of the analyses of the research into the expressive arts carried out under the direction of Alan Lomax and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg from 1960 to 1995 at Columbia University and Hunter College/CUNY."

FreeSound is a database of browsable, downloadable sounds under a Creative Commons License.

Royalty-free sound effects.

The world's largest archive of wildlife sounds. http://macaulaylibrary.org/terms-of-use

16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for personal, educational or research purposes. (Commercial uses require a license.)

SoundBible.com offers free sound clips for download in either wav or mp3 format. The clips on the linked page are royalty-free (please note that clips elsewhere on the site may not be royalty-free).