Website Reviews

Smithsonian Global Sound. Website address: http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/

On April 15, 2005, New York Times music columnist Jon Pareles wrote, "The Smithsonian Institution has just gone online with the ethnographic answer to iTunes: smithsonianglobalsound.org, with museum-quality annotation and royalties paid to musicians" ("This is the sound of globalization." New York Times, Apr. 15, 2005). Sounding a similar note, Public Radio International's program "The World" asked listeners, "if ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax or Folkways records founder Moses Asch had an iPod, what do you think they would have put on it?" In fact, a music connoisseur with a computer, a fast internet connection, and a modest amount of disposable income could visit global sound and quickly amass several gigabytes worth of culturally diverse music. That is not just hours, but weeks or even months, of recordings from around the world from among the 41,325 tracks in the digital collection.