Smithsonian Global Sound (review)

For information regarding the scope of this column, consult the headnote in the September 2005 issue (p. 188 of this volume). All Web sites accessed 23 November 2005.

Alexander Street Press, known by libraries primarily as a provider of full-text databases, has recently branched into the delivery of several online music databases. The earliest of these, Classical Music Library, has been reviewed in this column twice (Notes 60, no. 4 [ June 2004]: 1009–12; Notes 61, no. 4 [ June 2005]: 1057–59). Early in 2005 they acquired Smithsonian Global Sound, which had existed until then as a pay-per-track download service for individuals, delivering all the published recordings of the Smithsonian Folkways label, among other collections. As a result they are now offering institutions streaming access to the Smithsonian Folkways catalog; to the "archival audio collections" of several other labels, including Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, and Paredon; and to two prominent collections of ethnomusicological field recordings: those made by Hugh Tracey comprising the International Library of African Music (ILAM), and those of the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), containing many recordings of music from South Asia.

This is a truly remarkable collection for an online database of music. Fee-based services for music on the Web already provide abundant Western classical music (Classical Music Library and Naxos, in particular), contemporary popular music (Napster, Ruckus, and others), and even recent commercially published "world music" (Naxos, Napster, Ruckus, and others). But Global Sound represents the first endeavor to provide access to the largely non-profit attempts to record vernacular and world music by record labels as far back as the 1940s. Not only valuable as rare documentation of the music of the world, in many instances they are historic recordings in their own right. Hugh Tracey's recordings for the ILAM collection provided an early standard for African ethnomusicological research, and the efforts of Alan Lomax and Ralph Rinzler to collect folk music in the southern United States figure prominently in American folklore studies as well as in the history of recorded sound. These are among the more than 35,000 tracks available with a subscription to the entire database.

The search and playback interface for Global Sound is built on the model originally designed for Classical Music Library. Browsing functions are provided from a left sidebar, while a quick search box can always be found near the top of every screen. The choice of an advanced search opens up several boxes in the middle of the screen with selectable search fields and the choice of a Boolean AND or OR applied to the entire search. The results of searches are accompanied by a set of drop-down boxes near the top that allow for further limits—for example, a search for "Blues" as a genre might be post-limited by choice of instrument, say "harmonica." The results list displays, for each match, the principal performers, the track title and timing, and the album title (with the publisher's number), along with an option to buy that track as a download, or on CD. Accompanying buttons will play the track, bring up an information page, add the track to a personal playlist, or display the static URL for the track. The playback screen pops up as a small window, running on a Macromedia Flash player and a Windows Media Player, both free and readily available, although I experienced some difficulty playing in browsers other than Internet Explorer, and in Macintosh OS X in general (which improved considerably after I reported these problems to Alexander Street Press). There are playback and volume controls on the player, as well as a choice of two bit rates for streaming: 64K...