Music: Useful Links

The research guide from Harvard's Loeb Music Library, with many free resources covering musicology, music theory, composition, ethnomusicology, and more.

MusRef, a portal from the music library at Brigham Young University, includes an online bibliography of reference sources for music, both print and online, as well as guides for getting started with music reference sources. This site includes a huge collection of links to the vast world of freely available information about music on the web.

A portal to open-access projects that may be of use to musicians and musicologists.

A collection of musical scores and recordings in the public domain.

Digitized multimedia resources from the Library of Congress: historical sound recordings, sheet music, images, and more

One of the world's preeminent music collections, documenting the art of music in all its diversity

Music, theater, and dance at the Library of Congress

Database featuring images and sound files of world instruments from the University of Michigan's Sterns Collection

More than 5,000 images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art of musical instruments and artwork containing musical instruments

The Museum's music collections contain more than 5,000 instruments of American and European heritage

A division of the Yale School of Music

FreeSound is a database of browsable, downloadable sounds under a Creative Commons License.

Royalty-free sound effects.

16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for personal, educational or research purposes. (Commercial uses require a license.)

SoundBible.com offers free sound clips for download in either wav or mp3 format. The clips on the linked page are royalty-free (please note that clips elsewhere on the site may not be royalty-free).