Ethnomusicology

Great Grooves is a series of educational posts on West African drumming. Many posts also feature interactive African drumming multitrack mixers. Styles covered are Gahu, Adzrowo, Agbekor (slow), Agbekor (fast, Tokoe Kpanlogo, and Guaguancó (Afro-Cuban).

The complete collection of field recordings by James Koetting from Ghana in the 1970s is housed at Brown University.

Sekuru’s Stories is a digital public humanities project featuring the renowned Zimbabwean mbira player, oral historian, and ritual specialist Sekuru Tute Chigamba. Bringing Sekuru Chigamba’s oral narratives, or nhoroondo, together with recordings, photographs, and maps, it presents Zimbabwean musical and cultural heritage in an interactive format.

SAMAP aims to create an online resource on South African music and associated cultural heritage. This site currently contains approximately 13,000 audio samples and associated metadata from 5 music collections.

The AAAMC holdings cover a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions primarily from the post-World War II era.

The performers on these recordings come primarily from North and South Carolina, but also from Georgia and Mississippi. This collection contains more than 600 songs and half of them can be called songs of protest. It was digitally preserved as part of the Sound Directions Project. The recordings Gellert made were dangerous–both to himself and those who performed for him. In the deeply segregated south, making any kind of recordings among African Americans created risks for everyone involved and these recordings went beyond the kinds of songs that whites would have been aware of.

The primary sources of the Smithsonian document the history of art, culture, music, design, flight, space exploration, science and technology, landscapes and gardens, and native cultures in the United States, as well as the long history of the Smithsonian itself.

This collection of nearly 600 early disc recordings of Arab and Arab-American music spans the first half of the twentieth century, roughly 1903 through the 1950s. Many of the earliest records date to the late Nahda era, a period of “renaissance” in Arab literature and culture

From the National Film & Sound Archive, Sounds of Australia includes "sounds that make up Australia’s history, the sounds that are among the most important to our collective memories as Australians."

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is England’s national folk music and dance archive, an essential resource for anybody interested in the folk arts. The English Folk Dance and Song Society is the library’s custodian.

ITMA’s mission is to be the national public archive and resource centre for Irish traditional music, song and dance,

A collaborative project (School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh/ BBC Scotland; and the National Trust for Scotland's Canna Collection) to preserve, digitize, catalog, and mke available online Gaelic and Scots recordings.

Housed at the National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru), the archive's holdings include scores, books, magazines, manuscripts, and audio and video performances.

Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972) was an African American linguist who came to be known as the father of Gullah studies. The Turner Gullah collection was made in 1932 & 1933 and documents sermons, work songs, stories, spirituals, and accounts of slavery among 50 Gullah speakers.

Contains Hungarian folk music and folk dance documents and recordings. The collections of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály are the foundation of this archive.

The Alfredo Majorano Sound Archive provides access to songs from the oral tradition of Taranto, Italy. It also includes radio broadcasts that describe the olive harvest, tarantula dance, and more.

Gharamophone.com is dedicated to preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past. Extensive notes are included with each 78rpm, and many include sound files.

FAU's Judaic Collection contains over 8,500 albums. For recordings still under copyright, 45 second snippets can be listened to.

The Mayrent Collection contains over 9,000 78 rpm discs which include Yiddish theater, popular and traditional music, cantorial songs, klezmer music, poetry, drama, and event ballads and from locations worldwide.. The contents offer an unparalleled audio entrée into the vibrant, fascinating cultural practices of early- mid 20th century Yiddish life.

The Milken Archive was founded in 1990 to document, preserve, and disseminate the vast body of music that pertains to the American Jewish experience. The Archive is now the largest collection of American Jewish music roughly 600 recorded works, more than 500 of them world premieres.

The Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings houses over 15,000 recordings. YIVO's collection embraces all genres, including Holocaust songs, liturgical and Hasidic music, klezmer music, and yiddish theater music.

The Archive, established in 2002, contains over 129,000 items, some of which are in the public domain. Researchers can register for an account through their Google, Yahoo, or Facebook account.

The music collection and sound archive of the music department of the National Library of Israel collects, documents, preserves, and offers the public all matierla related to Israeli and Jewish music including books, notes, letters, private recordings, commercial recordings.

The LFK archive contains manuscripts, sound and video recordings, as well as photo materials that portray folklore narrators and the history of folklore collection in Latvia.

Over 125,000 songs celebrating North America’s Spanish-language musical heritage.

Digitized Norwegian folk music transcriptions. Most manuscripts are from the 19th century and early 20th century.

These recordings made during Jesse Walter Fewkes' research trip to Maine in March of 1890. The purpose of the trip was to test the Edison Phonograph in field conditions. After Fewkes' work with the Passamaquoddy, he went on to publish many journal articles and transcriptions of Passamaquoddy stories, which can also be found in this collection.

Collection includes 22 aluminum disc recordings of Kwakwaka'wakw Chief Dan Cranmer performing songs such as stick game songs, feast songs, paddling songs, mourning songs, and speeches; made in 1938.

George Herzog (1901-1983) made this collection of 195 wax cylinder recordings in 1928 at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota.

Ethnographic sound collection housed at the University of Auckland and relating to the Pacific, contains holdings of commercial and field recordings from most tribal groups of New Zealand and most Pacific Islands.

The Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1899 and is the world’s oldest sound archive. Contact the PhA for information on digital copies.

Thousands of scanned pages of traditional tunes of Sweden; song & hymn register, Swedish medieval ballads, and recordings

The Alan Lomax collection of Michigan and Wisconsin recordings (AFC 1939/007) documents Irish, Italian, Finnish, Serbian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Croatian, French Canadian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Swedish songs and stories, as well as occupational folklife among loggers and lake sailors in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The American Folklife Center Archive, established in the Library of Congress Music Division in 1928, is now one of the largest archives of ethnographic materials from the United States and around the world, encompassing millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation recorded from the nineteenth century to the present.

The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive consists of over 36,000 items, including photographs of folk artists and groups, press clippings, correspondence, publicity information, and posters and flyers. Also included are photographs and posters from other area music festivals.

Includes field recordings and oral histories of Cajun and Creole music and folklore. Some files may only be accessed on site.

Founded in 1959, Newport Folk has been the site of legendary musical performances for over 60 years.

Contains approximately 376 recordings of hymn singing, fiddle music, and banjo music recorded in Georgia in 1977.

Nearly 700 songs recorded on aluminum discs in the 1930s by Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. document traditional folksongs and ballads from Virginia.

Focus is on music of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa with work expanding to Mexico, Central and South America.

The Archives of Traditional Music documents music and culture from all over the world with over 100,000 recordings that include more than 3,300 field collections,

BL's Sounds Archive includes rare recordings from over the world, wax cylinders recorded by Percy Grainger, photographs, interviews with ethnomusicologists, and even sheep calls from Wales.

The Archive’s collection of more than 150,000 audio, video, print, and photographic items documents musical expressions throughout the world and includes unique field recordings as well as rare commercial recordings.

Collection highlights include music of indigenous peoples of the Pacific-Northwest and Central and South America.

Includes original field research materials that document musical practices from around the world.