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Required Plugins:

Quicktime 6.5 or greater

Adobe Shockwave Player 10
Overview
Developed by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Synchrotext enables recorded oral performance to come alive -- in the nuance and drama of its sound, its immediate meaning, and the broader web of its historical and cultural significance. Through Synchrotext you can see and hear presentations of recorded performances enhanced with scrolling transcriptions, translations, and multimedia commentaries. Like Smithsonian Global Sound itself, Synchrotext uses the tools of modern electronic media, which often marginalize traditional oral forms, to enhance their appreciation instead by making them widely available in a lively, meaningful, and engaging way. Synchrotext's multimedia presentations, or "works," are arranged in "libraries" in a familiar folder-file format. Once you have selected a work and proceeded past its titles, credits, and preface, you will manage the time of performance using familiar media-player controls. Synchrotext enhances the recorded performance with scrolling transcriptions, translations, and a selectable variety of commentaries.

Technical Requirements and How to Use Synchrotext
To play a Synchrotext work you need two freely downloadable programs: Adobe ShockWave, and Apple Quicktime.

Synchrotext will automatically prompt you to install any programs you don't already have, including necessary upgrades. In addition, after installing Shockwave, you will be prompted to install three "extras" that are necessary to Synchrotext. These take less than a minute and require only your affirmative responses. Finally, for computer security reasons, you will be asked whether to allow access to the programming provided by Synchrotext. You need to allow access in order to see and hear the player. When that one-time installation routine is complete, you will see a tree diagram of the libraries available in Synchrotext. We suggest you select Haya ballads and then one of the works included in that library. Click on a red Synchrotext icon and then on "Open." Proceed through the Opening Credits to the Introduction (which you may read while the media and text files load) and then to the Player itself by pushing the "Next" button.

The player controls are probably familiar. In addition to these, there are labels to the right of some lines that link to several kinds of commentary. We encourage you to listen to the work, to explore the levels of information about it that are available to you, and to interrogate the work yourself by searching for particular words in that work or in all the works in its library as a whole.

Email smithsonianglobalsound@si.edu for user support and more information on Synchrotext.



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