Global Sound - Musical Treasures of the World
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Radio Global Sound
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Music Partners
Regional archives around the world conserve valuable collections of world music. SGS links these institutions in an Internet-based exchange, making their holdings available to a global audience. Initially, SGS has established cooperative agreements with the International Library of African Music (ILAM), founded in 1954 and one of the greatest repositories of African music in the world, and the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in New Delhi, India, established in 1982 to collate, centralize, and preserve collections of Indian music and oral traditions. Global Sound plans to extend its offerings through cooperative agreements with other archives of folk, traditional, and classical music. To deliver the highest-quality audio available, SGS helps partner-archives to acquire computerized digital recording and processing equipment and supports technical training in its use. Negotiations are underway with additional archives and organizations around the world for inclusion in and partnership with SGS.

If you are an archive or collection interested in becoming one of our partners, please email smithsonianglobalsound@si.edu.


Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC)

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) implements cultural initiatives aimed at revitalising the heritage of Islamic communities and contributing to their social and economic development. Its programmes include: the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which recognises outstanding examples of contemporary design and promotes the conservation of Islamic architecture's urban heritage; the Historic Cities Support Programme, which undertakes the conservation and rehabilitation of historic buildings and urban spaces in ways that act as catalysts for social, economic and cultural development; the Humanities Project, which is developing a core, introductory humanities curriculum based on the cultural traditions of the region for use in universities in Central Asia; the Music Initiative in Central Asia, which works to preserve and promote the musical traditions of the region; the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, an endowed centre of excellence in the history, theory and practice of Islamic architecture based at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; ArchNet.org, which aims to become the most comprehensive archive of materials on architecture, urban design, urban development and related issues of concern to the Muslim world; and the Museums Project, which is creating the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Indian Ocean Maritime Museum in Zanzibar.


Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE)

ARCE is one of the most extensive audiovisual repositories of the oral traditions and performing arts of India. Housed in a state-of-the-art facility in New Delhi, it functions as a branch of the American Institute of Indian Studies of the University of Chicago, and is a member of a consortium of 52 major U.S. universities.

Established in 1982, ARCE serves as a repository for research tapes from South Asian and Western scholars. It collects commercial recordings and copies of recordings from collectors' private holdings. Drawn from 154 collections, these recordings range from classical music to folk and popular genres.

Materials deposited in ARCE are cataloged and made accessible to interested scholars and institutions. Global Sound offers the first opportunity for many of these recordings to be distributed around the world.

Among ARCE's publications are the ARCE Newsletter; a volume entitled Texts, Tones and Tunes: A Multicultural Perspective; and The Music of Bharat Natyam, by Jon Higgins. ARCE also carries out research projects, such as the Ethnographic Atlas of Musical Traditions in Western Rajasthan, undertaken with the Rupayan Sansthan (Rajasthan Institute of Folklore), in Jodhpur.

Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri, the director of ARCE, is chief coordinator of the Archives Resource Community (ARC), a network of 13 audiovisual archives in India.


International Library of African Music (ILAM)

Founded in 1954 by Hugh Tracey, ILAM is the greatest repository of African music in the world. A research institution devoted to the study of music and oral arts in Africa, it preserves thousands of historical recordings going back to 1929 and supports contemporary fieldwork. It is currently digitizing its collections. Its journal, African Music, is nearly into its fourth decade.

ILAM aims to discover, record, analyze, and archive the music of sub-Saharan Africa, with the object of establishing a theory of musicmaking in Africa and assessing the social, cultural, and artistic values of African music. It is a subdivision of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the Rhodes University campus in Grahamstown, South Africa.


Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage promotes the understanding and continuity of contemporary grassroots cultures in the United States and abroad. It produces the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, exhibitions, documentary films and videos, symposia, and educational materials. The Center conducts research, maintains archives, and provides educational and research opportunities.
www.folklife.si.edu.


Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

In 1987, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage acquired Folkways Records. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, Folkways sought to document the entire world of sound. The 2,168 titles Asch released on Folkways include traditional and contemporary music from around the world, spoken-word recordings, and documentary recordings of individuals, communities, and events. It grew to be one of the largest and most influential independent record companies in the world. The center keeps every recording in print.

The center's experience with Folkways lies at the heart of Smithsonian Global Sound. Folkways staff are intimately involved in the daily operations of the project. Tracks selected from the Folkways catalog of international recordings are featured on the Global Sound web site.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is self-sustaining. It carries out projects in collaboration with archives, museums, universities, and cultural centers around the world, resulting in unique and important musical documentation-for example, a 20-volume series on Indonesian music, supported by the Ford Foundation, and a five-volume series on Peru, produced in collaboration with the Archives of Traditional Andean Music, Lima, Peru.
www.folkways.si.edu.

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©2007 Smithsonian Institution

Produced with major support from The Rockefeller Foundation
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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