Global Sound - Musical Treasures of the World
Home
signup
Email Address:
Password:
Forgot Password?

Your Shopping Cart is Empty.


Quick Search:



Submit search
Advanced Search




Submit search


Submit search


Submit search


Submit search


Submit search


Submit search


Submit search

Radio Global Sound
Educational Institutions
Archives & Collections
Customer Support
Find Music Exlore Global Sound Tools for Teaching About Us My Global Sound
Press
May 7, 2008
When the Smithsonian Institution acquired Folkways Records from the estate of its founder, Moses Asch, in 1987, it received all of the company's business papers and files in addition to a complete catalog of its recordings. Among these materials were more than 2,000 envelope files, called "job bags," containing photographs, artwork, cover text and other production materials for each of Folkways' distinctive album covers.

Now, researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada are collaborating with Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage archivists and Smithsonian Folkways staff to document and preserve the contents of these job bags. Smithsonian Folkways recordings are available for digital download from Smithsonian Global Sound. Read more here.


October 16, 2007
Smithsonian Global Sound Tools for Teaching on iTunes U: Free global music resources for the classroom from Smithsonian Global Sound are now available at Apple's iTunes U service. Download lesson plans, activities, videos, and more and sync them with your computer or iPod. Smithsonian Global Sound is one of the first partners in iTunes U's new "Beyond Campus" section featuring free educational content from leading non-profit organizations.


June 25, 2007
Help Document the Smithsonian Folklife Festival: For the first time in Smithsonian history, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage have invited visitors to add to the rich history of photo documentation of the Folklife Festival. View a selection of these photos alongside photos taken by Smithsonian volunteers and staff. Upload your photos for inclusion in the exhibiton.


June 21, 2007
Smithsonian Global Sound Webcasts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival: The 41st Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival takes place June 27 through July 8 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Free to the public, this year’s Festival features programming from the Mekong Delta, Northern Ireland, and Roots of Virginia Culture. Smithsonian Global Sound will webcast live concerts and events. Visit Global Sound Live for webcast schedule and to view performances from past years. We also continue our annual tradition of giving away free downloads of music related to the Festival.


May 25, 2007
Smithsonian Global Sound at the Northwest Folklife Festival: Visit us at the annual Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle, Washington from May 25-29 where we will be distributing free download giveaways, presenting a panel on world music and the Internet, and hosting the Música del Pueblo concert featuring top Latino musicians from the Pacific Northwest. Our partnership with the Northwest Folklife Festival is sponsored by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.


April 25, 2007
American Music: David Font-Navarrete reviews Smithsonian Global Sound in the Spring issue of American Music saying "The phenomenon of digital music on the Internet marks a fundamental turning point in the way human beings make, listen to, and share music, and among the countless sources of music on the Internet, Global Sound is unique—an uniquely valuable."


March 6, 2007
Legendary Children’s Music Performer Ella Jenkins Added to Smithsonian Global Sound: Ella Jenkins, The First Lady of Children’s Music, has been entertaining and educating children and adults for over fifty years. Call and Response, her first recording for Folkways Records, was released in 1957. In honor of her 50th anniversary as a Folkways artist, she offers hundreds of individual track downloads of her delightful and inspiring music for the first time online at Smithsonian Global Sound. Find her recordings here.


October 10, 2006
Smithsonian Global Sound Music at Yahoo! Event: For 30 days, from October 10 until November 8, Yahoo! invites their users worldwide to contribute photos, writings, videos, audio - even drawings - to their electronic time capsule. The contributions will capture the voices, images, and stories of the online global community at this moment in time. This digital data will be sealed and entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, officially taking its place in history. From October 25-27, Yahoo! will display time capsule submissions at Red Rock Canyon in New Mexico and web cast the event live. At Yahoo!’s invitation, Smithsonian Global Sound provided a selection of community-based, culturally emblematic tracks from cultures around the world as a soundtrack to underscore the event’s technological reach. The tracks included in the event are listed here.


September 15, 2006
Radio Latino Launched for Hispanic Heritage Month: In collaboration with the Smithsonian Latino Center, Smithsonian Global Sound presents Radio Latino featuring the lively sounds of música latina throughout the Americas. Listen here.


September 10, 2006
Smithsonian Global Sound Welcomes Music of Central Asia: Produced by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Music of Central Asia is a newly recorded series presenting authentic musical traditions of Central Asia as they are performed today, featuring some of the region's most outstanding artists. With recordings and performances from the nomadic and Bardic cultures of the steppes as well as the classical court traditions of the cities, this series celebrates musicians who display a mastery of older traditions and also embody a contemporary spirit of innovation. Smithsonian Global Sound is the first to offer this series for digital download. Volumes 1-3 are now available here.


September 5, 2006
"Tools for Teaching" Launches with Free Activities and Lesson Plans: Smithsonian Global Sound presents Tools of Teaching, a section of the website with ideas and resources for educators to inspire their use of music from around the world. Download free activities and lesson plans, including newly digitized education kits from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, here.


August 30, 2006
Smithsonian Global Sound Welcomes Collector Records: Joe Glazer (1918-2006), often called "Labor's Troubadour," founded Collector Records in 1970 to document the music of America's labor movements. Songs recount the movements’ struggles for fair wages, pay tribute to its heroes, and depict everyday hazards and ailments encountered on the job, allowing workers to express their situation and make audiences aware of the conditions they face. The label features songs by Glazer, Bobbie McGee, and Eddie Starr. Read more here.


June 30, 2006, 2006
Smithsonian Folklife Festival Webcasted Live on Smithsonian Global Sound: Global Sound joins with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to webcast live concerts from the National Mall. The 2006 Folklife Festival on Global Sound features today's top singers and songwriters from Alberta, Canada, traditional and contemporary music from Latino Chicago, New Orleans jazz and blues, and country and bluegrass from Virginia. View the concerts here.


May 19, 2006
Entertainment Weekly: Smithsonian Global Sound is #11 in a list of The 25 Best Music Websites. "The best government program since the New Deal." Read more here.


April 11, 2006
Smithsonian Global Sound Nominated for a 2006 Webby Award: The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in web design, functionality, and creativity. The Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 500-member body of leading web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries, and creative celebrities. Smithsonian Global Sound is nominated for Best Charitable/Nonprofit Organization website.


March 7, 2006
Teach Poetry Using Global Sound: The Spring issue of Smithsonian In Your Classroom, a publication of lesson plans from the Smithsonian, features music and poetic readings from Smithsonian Global Sound teachers can use to introduce students to ballad and blues stanzas. Smithsonian Global Sound created a special page with full-length tracks and video to accompany the lesson plans. View the special feature here.


January 30, 2006
Radio Asia Launched: Smithsonian Global Sound and the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries have collaborated to bring you Radio Asia, which streams hours of authentic musical traditions from the planet’s largest continent
Listen here.


January 18, 2006
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries Reaches 100 Subscribers: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, a product of Alexander Street Press, is now available in over 100 educational institutions around the world. The 100th customer was a digital library in Mexico funded by the government to provide distance learning to technical institutes around the country. Learn more about subscribing to Smithsonian Global Sound here.


December 29, 2005
Radio Africa Launched: Smithsonian Global Sound and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art have collaborated to bring you Radio Africa, which streams hours of music from a continent rich with creativity, power, and enchantment
Listen here.


October 17, 2005
Macworld Magazine: "Good roots music can be hard to find, and digitizing what I do find can be a pain. That's why I'm so excited about Smithsonian Global Sound -- the folk-music lover's answer to the iTunes Music Store."


August 2, 2005
Playlist Magazine: "Indeed, perusing the SGS website is an education in itself. Searching by instrument, the banjo for example, allows you to drill down into subsets, such as tenor banjos, five string banjos, and related Asian instruments such as the ben cho and jyabisen. You could even concoct your own album of banjo folk from around the world, tracing how it has evolved across time and geography."
Read here.


June 10, 2005
Newsweek.com: "Visitors to the Global Sound site can buy protest songs by Woody Guthrie, traditional Ghanaian drum jams or folks ditties from Norway. And attentive music fans who know that much has been made about the White Stripes' inclusion of a marimba song on their new album, Get Behind Me Satan, ought to consider that a 'marimba' search on the Global Sounds site delivers seven pages of results."
Read here.


May 10, 2005
The World: "If ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax or Folkways Records founder Moses Asch had an iPod, what do you think they would have put on it?"
Listen here.


April 15, 2005
The New York Times: "And the Smithsonian Institution has just gone online with the ethnographic answer to iTunes: smithsonianglobalsound.org, with museum-quality annotation and royalties paid to musicians."
Read here.


April 11, 2005
Salon.com: "Smithsonian Global Sound -- the most exciting online music happening in quite some time."
Read here.


April 1, 2005
The Washington Post: "When we saw the blossoming of the Internet, we thought, what if we could use this as a device for opening up the archives?," says Richard Kurin, who is in charge of the Folkways archives. "People who don't usually have a voice can have a voice in a democratic, central way."
Read here.


March 13, 2005
National Public Radio: "Smithsonian Folkways Recordings explores a world of sound -- not just music, but birds, bugs and machines. Now the Smithsonian has put this entire collection of sounds on the Web."
Listen here.


For media inquiries please contact smithsonianglobalsound@si.edu.


Mission Statement
Music Partners
Sponsors
Licensing Requests
News and Press Room
Contact Us


SI Folklife Contact Copyright Privacy Credits
©2007 Smithsonian Institution

Produced with major support from The Rockefeller Foundation
Full Text Only Catalog

Smithsonian Global Sound

www.smithsonianglobalsound.org

"The ethnographic answer to iTunes" -- New York Times

Smithsonian Global Sound is an unparalleled experience of world music. Download music and sound from acclaimed international archives such as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the International Library of African Music, the Archives & Research Centre for Ethnomusicology in India, and Central Asian recordings from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Many tracks at www.smithsonianglobalsound.org are rare, newly preserved recordings that are now extensively cataloged and easily accessible around the world. Royalties support artists and archives, honoring and establishing intellectual property rights. By distributing these exciting sounds, Smithsonian Global Sound increases interest in traditional world music and promotes the appreciation of cultural diversity around the world.

Smithsonian Global Sound increases interest in traditional world music and promotes the appreciation of cultural diversity around the world. Royalties support artists and archives, honoring and establishing intellectual property rights. Many tracks are rare, newly preserved recordings that are now extensively cataloged and easily accessible. By distributing these exciting sounds around the world, Smithsonian Global Sound aims to inspire future generations of musicians to continue to promote their cultural heritage.

The Smithsonian Global Sound Experience

Browse, sample, and download thousands of beautiful and culturally significant tracks of music and sound. Don't know where to start? Listen to Radio Global Sound, watch video on Global Sound Live, read fascinating and in depth Artist Profiles, or discover exciting new music through our Musical Journeys from world music celebrities.

Downloads are available in versatile MP3 format or CD quality FLAC files. Our open files allow access through any computer or any portable media player. Smithsonian Global Sound is unique in that it offers a rich store of free material to accompany the audio, including original Folkways liner notes and new contextual information created by archival collaborators.

"Smithsonian Global Sound - the most exciting online music happening in quite some time." -- Salon.com

Enhancing Education via music in the Classroom

Smithsonian Global Sound is an invaluable tool for ethnomusicology, social sciences, and language arts educators. This virtual music library of the future gives teachers, students, and scholars instant access to original recordings and extensive documentation from diverse cultures all over globe. Many libraries from Harvard University to the University of Wisconsin to the Denver Public Library have already enhanced their collections with a subscription from Smithsonian Global Sound.

"The Smithsonian Global Sound site is a fabulous resource of authentic music, and I am looking forward to sharing it with my students." � DeKalb, Illinois
Middle school teacher

Supporting Musicians and Archives of Traditional Music

Royalties earned from the sale of music on the site go to the artists, their communities, the archives that preserve their recordings, and further development of Smithsonian Global Sound. These groundbreaking practices give musicians and artists a chance to maintain their cultures and profit from their work while forging new bonds between local sound archives and the communities whose music they preserve.

If you are an archive or collection interested in joining with Smithsonian Global Sound, please contact smithsonianglobalsound@si.edu.

"When we saw the blossoming of the Internet, we thought, what if we could use this as a device for opening up the archives? People who are not usually heard can project their voices around the planet." - Richard Kurin, Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage