Smithsonian Global Sound

Smithsonian Global Sound® includes 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. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies. The collection is an outgrowth of the vision and work of Folkways Records’ founder Moses Asch, who created a veritable encyclopedia of the human experience of sound, releasing more than 2,000 albums between 1948 and 1986, including those by American folk icons such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and countless influential others. The collection also encompasses animal sounds, beer-drinking at an African homestead; calypso; classical violin instruction; drama; poetry; sounds of the deep ocean, the office, and the ionosphere; a frog being eaten by a snake; and great performances of traditional music from virtually everywhere in the world.