Music

A crowdsourced directory of digital music projects.

"Welcome to the world's largest freely accessible database for information on musical instruments held in public collections. Our database now contains the records of 101863 instruments."

The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas, with particular emphasis on the African Diaspora. Sponsored by Vanderbilt University.

Cities and Memory is a global collaborative sound project encompassing field recording, sound art and sound mapping – remixing the world, one sound at at time.

War, social injustice, personal plaints, and calls for action have long fueled musical creation and performance. In Classic Protest Songs, Mark Gustafson and Jeff Place tap the historic Smithsonian audio collections to compile 22 songs favored by leaders of antiwar, civil rights, industrial labor, farm worker, and other struggles to air their grievances. Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Janis Ian, Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, Barbara Dane, Guy Carawan, Phil Ochs, and other marquee artists let their voices ring out with calls for peace and justice.

From parties to protests to prayer, music is a powerful catalyst for celebration, for change, and for a sense of community. Through making music together, we become bigger than ourselves. Whether singing with our families and friends or with thousands of strangers in an arena, music transforms lives, engages individuals, and connects local and global communities. The Social Power of Music chronicles the vivid, impassioned, and myriad ways in which music binds, incites, memorializes, and moves groups of people.

Explore 894,276 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

Digitized full text, manuscript, audio, and image files from the Library of Congress collections. Includes selections from Presidential papers, Congressional documents, maps, pamphlets music and photographs from significant social, cultural and political movements.