Library Guides: Media Collections for Fine Arts and Music: Find Sound

Required listening lists

Required listening lists for subjects have been made available for students in the relevant subject LMS/Canvas sites. Speak with your lecturer if you're unsure.

NOTE: For general listening, Naxos Music Library and other online music services are still available.

Sound Recording databases

Music Online - Alexander Street Press
Music Online is the broadest and most comprehensive online music resource that cross-searches all of the library's Alexander Street Press music databases.
Music Online - American Song
American Song is a history database that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.

Tens of thousands of online sound recordings are discoverable by searching in the library catalogue. You can also search directly for these sound recordings, and more, by accessing the following databases.

Australian Composers Collection on Minerva
Australian Composers Off-Air Sound Recordings.
Classical Music Library (Alexander Street Press)
Multi-label database of Classical music recordings for listening and learning in libraries. Coverage includes music written from the earliest times (e.g. Gregorian Chant) to the present, including many contemporary composers. Repertoire ranges from vocal and choral music, to chamber, orchestral, solo instrumental, and opera.
Contemporary World Music (Alexander Street Press)
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.
Jazz Music Library (Alexander Street Press)
Jazz Music Library is the largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.
Naxos Music Library (Naxos Digital Services)
Classical music recordings from more than 50 classical, jazz and world music labels
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries (Alexander Street Press)
World and folk music; also includes spoken word and foreign language recordings.
Search by country, cultural group, etc. Includes liner notes, and cover art.

Open Access Sound databases

British Library Sounds
Digital archive of 12,000 sound recordings.
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
University of California's archive of digitized cylinder recordings spanning mid-1890s to mid-1920s
Internet Archive - Audio Archive
Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings.
Recording Pioneers
Who's who of sound recorders from 1878 to 1940.
US National Jukebox
More than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.
more...less...
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.
UbuWeb
Large educational resource of avant-garde material in the fields of visual, concrete and sound poetry. It also includes film and sound archives.

CDs & Vinyl Collections

To find sound recordings, do a keyword search on the library catalogue.

Keyword search for online recordings

Specify distinctive words or phrases, e.g. Messiaen
Modify or Limit Search to Online Music Audio by clicking on the drop-down menu

Other Music Subject Research Guides

The following links will take you to further information about how to find music related resources in the University of Melbourne Library: