Research Tools: Music: Home

Search by topic keywords, i.e., jazz and guitar, or other keywords.

For Streaming Music:

• American Song. Songs by and about children, civil rights, cowboys, immigrants, Native Americans, pioneers, politics, slaves, and war.
• Classical Music Online. Streaming classical music.
• Contemporary World Music. Sounds of all regions from every continent, including reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz; other genres such as traditional music, Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.
• Jazz Music Library. The largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.
• Naxos Music Library: World's largest online library of streaming classical music.
• Popular Music Library. Wide range of popular music from around the world, including hundreds of thousands of tracks from major genres in pop music, including alternative, country, Christian, electronic, hip-hop, metal, punk, new age, R&B, reggae, rock, soundtracks and many more.
• Smithsonian Global Sound. Tracks of music, the spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds.

For Facts, Definitions, Background Information:

• Our Facts/Definitions page searches hundreds of reliable dictionaries and encyclopedias.
• Oxford Music Online. Includes Oxford Dictionary of Music, Grove Music Online and Oxford Companion to Music, with more than 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, instruments and notation, forms and genres, and individual works.

For News:

On our News Resources page you can search  individual newspapers (New York Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.) or you can search across many newspapers at one time using the Newspaper Source database. These papers may contain reviews and related articles.

For journal articles (expert opinions and research results):

• Academic Search Complete.  Multidisciplinary database of full-text articles from scholarly journals, magazines, government documents and other sources. Good starting place for basic coverage of topics.
• Central Index. Broad coverage of interdisciplinary journals and other materials. 
• JSTOR. Articles from scholarly journals in the arts and sciences.
• Project Muse. Articles from scholarly journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences. 
• Scopus. Discover citations with some full-text articles in science, medicine, technology, and the social sciences. Includes tracking by citation, and identifying high impact articles.

Other Tools:

• Multiple Database Search Tool: Go here if you know the exact title of an article, i.e., "avant-garde music".  This full-text finder tool will provide direction to the source of the article.

For Scores:

Expert opinions can be found in books: see our local book catalog for searching. You may want to expand your search to the I-Share state-wide catalog (using the drop-down option under the search box) or our electronic book page.

This catalog includes many formats, including movies, manuscripts, and e-Books.

• eBooks and Text and the the Internet Archive. Digitized music, videos, and TV News.
• EBL (Electronic Book Library): Results may be viewed online or downloaded. (Download requires an Adobe ID and Adobe Digital Editions (or another ePub Reader app).
• EBSCObooks — browse by category. Results may be viewed online or downloaded. (Download requires an Adobe ID and Adobe Digital Editions (or another ePub Reader app).
• HathiTrust Digital Library. Preserves and provides access to material scanned by Google, some Internet Archive books, and some scanned locally by partner institutions.
• LibriVox Audiobooks: Listen to free audiobooks on your computer, iPod, other mobile device, or burn onto a CD.  LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and release the audio files back onto the net for free. Most of the texts are from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive hosts the audio files.

• Discography of American Historical Recordings from UC Santa Barbara Library
• National Association for Music Education (NAfME) -- instrumental in developing the National Standards for Arts Education.
• Mathematics and Music (American Mathematical Association) -- videos, articles, other materials.
• Early Music Sources  is designed to "simplify the access to the vast amount of online early music sources." 
• Math, Science & Music developed by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
• Milton and Nelma Fillius Jazz Archive -- a collection of videotaped interviews, currently numbering 300+ entries, with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers and critics. The collection generally focuses on artists associated with mainstream jazz and the swing era.
• Hip-Hop and Rap Across the Smithsonian the first collection to include music from every major label and dozens of independent label recordings.
• Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music Referencing Guide (from Monash University)
• Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (BGMRP) is to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalogue the most at-risk music from the black gospel music tradition. This collection will primarily contain 78s, 45s, LPs, and the various tape formats issued in the United States and abroad between the 1940s and the 1980s.
• archive.org new music player  -  includes music digitized at high resolution, and the album liner notes, including full CD booklets and the paper labels on the discs themselves. And at the bottom of each page are lists of related music tracks – covers, other versions of the same song done by the same artist and compilations where that song has been used. While you can listen to only a sample of most modern songs, the new player now embeds Spotify and YouTube versions of the full song, so listeners are now able to click right from archive.org to those services and listen to the full track.
• Unlocked Recordings - the Internet Archive and the Boston Public Library are creating a repository of digitized LPs. 

 Zotero. Use this tool to capture, organize and search within saved journal articles, web pages, and your own thoughts.

You can also seamlessly cite your sources and create bibliographies within Word documents.