To Learn More about Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries
Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is the largest and most comprehensive streaming audio collection of world music. With nearly 3,000 albums and more than 40,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and humanmade sounds, this collection includes the published recordings owned by the nonprofit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label together with the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels.
The collection is an outgrowth of the vision and work of Folkways Records’ founder, Moses Asch, who created a veritable encyclopedia of the human experience of sound, releasing more than 2,000 albums between 1948 and 1986, including those by American folk icons Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and countless influential others. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.
