150 hours of audio and almost 100 photographs from the Peter Kennedy Collection have been made available this week via the British Library Sounds website.…

Shellachead is a new site for early world music recordings. It includes notes, image of the label, and the recordings.
http://shellachead.com/

The site is done by the same person as runs the Haji Maji site, which concerns itself with shellac from Asia.
http://hajimaji.wordpress.com/

(Thanks to my colleague, James Tugwell, for introducing me to these sites.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666r

This is the story of how Seamus Ennis, Alan Lomax et al collected Irish traditional material, some of which became the eponymous LP.

The Singing Wells Project is a partnership between The Abubilla Music Foundation, a UK registered charity (no. 1142173) and Ketebul Music, a non profit music & video studio based in Nairobi. Have a look at their website, which includes some beautiful video footage of a range of musics from around Kenya.

http://www.singingwells.org/

Archaeologists and music experts believe they have found the remains of the earliest stringed instrument ever found in Western Europe – dating to more than 2,300 years ago – at the excavation of Uamh An Ard Achadh (High Pasture Cave) on the Island of Skye.…

http://www.itma.ie/digitallibrary/about/inishowen

Funded locally by Inishowen Development Partnership, this project is a collaboration between the Inishowen Traditional Singers' Circle www.inishowensinging.ie>(ITSC) in Donegal and the Irish Traditional Music Archive www.itma.ie>(ITMA) in Dublin, to host song material collected in Inishowen…

For those of you who have been following Gus Casely-Hayford's new series of Lost Kingdoms of Africa on BBC 4 these past weeks, tonight's programme was about kingdoms of Uganda. If you are interested in hearing the music from the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, discussed at length in the programme, explore the Klaus Wachsmann Archive on sounds.bl.uk at…

Afropop has been producing some very interesting programmes and posting great photos and videos of Cairo's current music scene. This from their latest posting at:

http://www.afropop.org/radio/radio_program/ID/846

Egypt's revolution has brought much to light, including a lot of music that's been percolating in hidden corners there, largely ignored by nearly all…

Some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts collected by the folklorist and ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax, is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.…

Each volume focuses on one popular music album of the last several decades. New proposals are being sought for original research, for stories in the history of popular music (recent or otherwise) and for perspectives that will broaden and develop the discipline of writing about music, as read by a global readership of music scholars and fans.

The full call can be seen her: http://www.33third.blogspot.com/

In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon led an anthropological expedition from Cambridge (UK) to the Torres Strait Islands. They had with them a phonograph with which they made recordings of speech, songs and ceremonies. A few years ago I made a documentary programme on the expedition for BBC Archive Hour, produced by Monty Funk Productions. The programme has now been made available on their website as a podcast.…

The SierraLeoneHeritage.org digital resource is the main output of a research project entitled ‘Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Repatriation, Knowledge Networks and Civil Society Strengthening in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’. Historically, cultural heritage has been a low priority in Sierra Leone. The hope is that by reanimating dispersed collections held in the Sierra Leone Natinal Museum, The British Museum, The British Library (among others) and the differently-situated knowledges…

Dan Sheehy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings explains, with reference to "The Sound and Story of Salvadoran Chanchona” on the Salvadoran community in the D.C. area". http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2011_fall/cover_story-chanchona.aspx

The World and Traditional Music section at the British Library has worked with ethnomusicologists/field recordist since 2000. Since then he has created a large archive or audio and video recordings of music and customs from rural, and often very remote, areas of India.

Some of his videos can be seen on his YouTube channel at…

Ethnomultimedia.org

This represents a very nice collaboration between publishers and an academic society, enabling authors to distribute audiovisual materials to accompany their publications.