LibGuides: Music Research: Useful Links

Associations

Music Library Association (MLA)
American Musicological Society (AMS)
Society for Music Theory (SMT)
Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)
International Association of Music Information Centers Promotes and provides information about contemporary music around the world

Sound Recordings

The National Jukebox The National Jukebox is a project to digitize a part of the Library of Congress's holdings in early sound recordings. From their website: "the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others."
The Internet Archive: Audio Archive The audio archives at the Internet Archive include the recordings of many contemporary composers as well as popular songs digitized from early 20th century 78 RPM records.
UC Santa Barbara Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project "The UCSB Library, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Grammy Foundation and donors, has created a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. To bring these recordings to a wider audience, the Library makes them available to download or stream online for free. "
FolkStreams "A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites."
Awesome Tapes from Africa
The Global Jukebox "The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place...to explore expressive patterns in...cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage....The Global Jukebox makes available to the general public, scholars and scientists all of the data and many of the analyses of the research into the expressive arts carried out under the direction of Alan Lomax and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg from 1960 to 1995 at Columbia University and Hunter College/CUNY."
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings The nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution with spoken word, instruction, and sounds from around the world.
Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.

Online Music Resources

Online Resources for Music Scholars (Harvard University)
The research guide from Harvard's Loeb Music Library, with many free resources covering musicology, music theory, composition, ethnomusicology, and more.
MusRef (Brigham Young University)
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.
Digital Resources for Musicology (DRM)
A portal to open-access projects that may be of use to musicians and musicologists.
Petrucci Music Library - International Music Score Library Project
A collection of musical scores and recordings in the public domain.
American Memory: Performing Arts, Music
Digitized multimedia resources from the Library of Congress: historical sound recordings, sheet music, images, and more
New York Public Library Digital Collections: Music Division
One of the world's preeminent music collections, documenting the art of music in all its diversity
Library of Congress - Performing Arts Encyclopedia
Music, theater, and dance at the Library of Congress

Musical Instruments

Instrument Encyclopedia
Database featuring images and sound files of world instruments from the University of Michigan's Sterns Collection
The Met: Musical Instruments
More than 5,000 images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art of musical instruments and artwork containing musical instruments
National Museum of American History: Music and Musical Instruments
The Museum's music collections contain more than 5,000 instruments of American and European heritage
Yale Collection of Musical Instruments
A division of the Yale School of Music

Sound Effects

FreeSound
FreeSound is a database of browsable, downloadable sounds under a Creative Commons License.
Partners in Rhyme
Royalty-free sound effects.
BBC 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.)
Sound Bible--Royalty Free Sounds
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).