Skip to Main Content

The Library: Music & Sound

Copyright guidelines

Sound

Websites

The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music provides access to the online discography and library of ex-copyright recordingspublications, and information on early recording history and methods for analysing recordings.

Music documentaries from the Radio 4 archive, from Armstrong to Zappa. 

Explore more than a decade of Radio 3 on-location recordings from 2000 to the present in our World Music archive, recording the life and musical traditions of countries ranging from Brazil to North Korea and Cuba to Turkmenistan. 

This gateway includes nearly 1,200 websites relating to moving image and sound materials. These have been sub-divided into over 40 subject areas, including History.

Digital edition of the letters (15,000) written to Casa Ricordi, the world famous music publisher, during the 19th and 20th centuries by writers, singers and composers including Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Franz Liszt, Ottorino Respighi, and Jules Massenet. 

Charles Avison (1709-1770) was born in Newcastle and became England’s most important eighteenth-century concerto composer. Newcastle City Library houses The Avison Archive in conjunction with The Avison Society. 

Early Music Online has digitised over 320 volumes of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, from holdings at the British Library. 

Europeana Music brings together a selection of the best music recordings, sheet music, and other music related collections from Europe's audio-visual archives, libraries, archives and museums. Explore over 300,000 music recordings, pieces of sheet music and other music items from across Europe and listen to Europeana Radio where you can choose from Classical Music or Traditional and Folk Music.

Supported by the New Opportunities Fund in 2001-2003, FARNE gathered unique material from a range of museums, libraries and archives across North East England to create a folk music archive on the Internet. Material includes song lyrics, tunes, sound recordings and photographs.

Freesounds is a collaborative collection of free sounds, audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.  Freesounds Labs is a directory of projects, hacks, apps, research and other initiatives related to Freesounds. 

Official archive documenting the history of this famous music festival. 

This digital archive contains sound recordings, interactive scores and other items relating to Irish traditional music. 

Joseph Hornsby is a Northumbrian fiddler with an extensive multimedia archive of traditional Scottish country dance music. This online archive (a project based in ICMuS) has a fascinating social history as well as great musical value, and is a valuable resource for musicians and scholars alike. 

Since 1949 Leeds Central Library has had a Leeds Music Library providing a contemporary, cutting-edge music service and creating the ‘go to place’ for music in the city. 

A free online archive of sound recordings, radio, photographs, video and other resources related to traditional music and creative heritage.     

Covering approximately 1733 to 1968, this collection includes a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. 

Digitised collections relating to opera from the Victoria and Albert museum. 

The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - International Inventory of Musical Sources - is an international, non-profit organisation that aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. RISM records what exists and where it can be found. 

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. It presents images and/or metadata for thousands of manuscripts. Please note that not every record includes digital images.  

The world's biggest digital archive of English traditional music and dance: 44,000 records and 58,000 images.