Sing Out!, the nonprofit organization and magazine that sprouted from the progressive folk scene in the early 1950s, seeks to "preserve and support the cultural diversity and heritage of all traditional and contemporary folk musics, and to encourage making folk music a part of our everyday lives." While the magazine requires a subscription, there is much on the website that may be accessed free of...

National and International Jazz Appreciation Month happens to be April, but this shouldn't stop visitors from celebrating the richness of this form of musical expression during any of the other eleven months of the calendar. The Smithsonian Jazz initiative has created this very fine website that brings together oral histories from jazz greats such as Artie Shaw, information about the Smithsonian's...

The Smithsonian Institution notes that if all of their "diverse music-related collections ... [were] assembled in one place, the Smithsonian would be the largest music museum in the world," leading them to celebrate 2019 as their Year of Music. Readers can explore some of these music collections through this website, which gathers numerous highlights from the Smithsonian's music resources into one...

The Library of Congress has bringing a number of America’s musical archives to its website through the “I Hear America Singing” project, and this addition to their existing work is most welcome. The Song of America website is designed to serve as a companion piece to an ongoing 11-city concert tour which features the baritone Thomas Hampson performing a number of American songs. This site draws...

Birds come in many shapes and sizes, and this particularly lovely Songbird application can be customized in ways that aren't currently possible with say, a robin or the common barn owl. This open source application is part digital jukebox, part web browse mash-up. It allows users to play just about any media file available, and users can also customize with two unique skins, which the makers of...

Paul Anka and Francis Scott Key don't usually come up in the same sentence (or paragraph, most likely), but here in the Songwriters Hall of Fame Virtual Museum both men are part of the heady mix that visitors will find on this interesting and entertaining website. This Hall of Fame has a distinguished pedigree as its first president in 1969 was Tin Pan Alley icon Johnny Mercer, who himself was...

SoundCloud is a popular audio distribution platform. Musicians can upload their music and music lovers can listen for free. With content creators uploading about 12 hours of audio every minute, there is almost no genre that can't be located through a simple search. SoundCloud is also available as an app for Android (4.2.2+)

The city of Eau Claire, WI, is known today as the site of multiple yearly music festivals and has a long history as a music city--but "[w]hat does it mean to be a 'music city' in western Wisconsin?" This is one of the questions that Sounds of Eau Claire addresses. This public history initiative began in 2017 and features (at this time of writing) five online exhibits and more than fifty digital...

Whether one knows him by one of his popular sobriquets ("Ol' Blue Eyes" or "The Voice") or just through his distinctive vocal styling, Francis Albert Sinatra remains one of the most popular singers ever. These two sites pay tribute to his legacy through words and music, both of which are quite apropos. The first link leads to the homepage of The Sounds of Sinatra, which is a radio program hosted...

Would you like to hear the sounds of people playing bingo in Glasgow? Perhaps you are interested in a night recording of crickets in Speyside, Tobago? These and many other soundscapes can be found at the Soundtransit website. Developed as a collaborative online archive of field recordings, the site contains a wide variety of sound clips from around the world, submitted by persons from countries...