Search Tips and Subject Headings
Always start with what you know! Try searching for a style, country, region, or ethnic group and the term music. Then, apply the Audio filter under Resource Type and evaluate your results to see how they are described. Check to see which Subjects are used to describe the topic -- you can then click on these to find related materials or use them to develop new search terms.
Examples of Subjects include:
- Highlife (music)
- Afrobeat
- Folk music -- Africa, North
- Music -- Africa, North
- Songs, Arabic -- Africa, North
Additionally, see our guide on finding music materials:
Discographies and Recommended Resources
Discographies are descriptive catalogs for musical recordings. They're a lot like bibliographies, which are for text sources, and often focus on specific performers, genres, record labels, regions, or more. They can help you find and identify recordings.
The Rough Guide to World Music by Call Number: ML100 W671999All entries in this reference are fully revised and updated with expanded discographies in which the CD reviews are preceded by quickly-accessible, biographical three-liners on the artists and bands. For a list of CDs in the series specific to Africa, click here.
African Music on LP by Call Number: ML156.2 M37Location: Music & Performing Arts Reference [non-circulating]
The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music by Call Number: ML3502.5G72 D2Location: Music & Performing Arts Reference [non-circulating]
The world of African music by Call Number: ML3502.5 .G73 1992A companion volume to Stern's Guide to Contemporary African Music Volume I. Since then the World Music phenomenon of the last few years has created multiple new demands for African music - through recordings, live performances and for information and analysis. This new book digs deeper into the African musical past highlighting new areas of interest and bringing the story up to date.
Field Recordings of Black Singers and Musicians by Call Number: ML156.4.B56 G53 2018Location: Music & Performing Arts Reference [non-circulating]
Traditional African musical forms have long been accepted as fundamental to the emergence of blues and jazz. Yet there has been little effort at compiling recorded evidence to document their development. This discography brings together hundreds of recordings that trace in detail the evolution of the African American musical experience, from early wax cylinder recordings made in West Africa to voodoo rituals from the Caribbean Basin to the songs of former slaves in the American South.
Streaming Collections
- Ethnographic Sound Archives This link opens in a new windowEthnographic Sound Archives Online brings together over 2,000 hours of previously unpublished historic field recordings from around the world, alongside their supporting field notes and ethnographers’ metadata, opening new paths for the study of music in its cultural context.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new windowEthnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition is a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and class room exercises and activities. There are a variety of themes that are discussed including family and kinship, gender roles, cultural identity, belief systems and other topics centered around diversity, change, and culture.
- Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings This link opens in a new windowThis database provides access to thousands of audio field recordings, interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, correspondence, and other resources from a variety of areas of study in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.
- Smithsonian Global Sound This link opens in a new windowIncludes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. Includes music recorded around the African continent for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University and material collected on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.
- Music Online: Contemporary World Music This link opens in a new windowMusic Online: Contemporary World Music delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent. The database will contain important genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.
- Afropop WorldwideAfropop Worldwide is a Peabody award-winning radio program and online magazine dedicated to music from Africa and the African diaspora.
- Awesome Tapes from AfricaThis is music you won’t easily find anywhere else—except, perhaps in its region of origin.
- EthnoCloudEthnoCloud is a platform for collaboration and discovery. Our goal is to promote ethnically and culturally inspired music of all genres and all regions of the world.
- Global Music ArchiveThe 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.