The Global Sound Movement (GSM) website establishes a central repository for the practice-based research and is a significant contributor to the fields of sonic archiving and ethnomusicology. This publication disseminates research findings and presents a multitude of ways in which an international audience engages with the many and varied outputs of the GSM. The research took place globally with multiple projects completed in; Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia and USA. This was conducted between June 2015 and February 2020. In total, over 450 recordings have been made.

Preserving musical / sonic heritage is paramount to framing our present and determine the future of musical composition. The GSM has numerous key facets all of which are original to the work, firstly the identification of culturally vulnerable communities globally whose traditional forms and habits of music making, and soundscape environments are threatened by the forces of modernity; it then involved extensive fieldwork making high resolution recordings of the unique musical instruments – which are particular to these communities – being played in their natural environments by  indigenous musicians. The third, and arguably most important, strand of this work was that these recordings were not merely archived for posterity as has often been the case in orthodox approaches to the gathering of sound as evidenced by the work of Alan Lomax, Bernie Krause, Louis Sarano, Frances Densmore and the British Library; but the recordings of musical instruments were digitised using industry standard samplers that integrate into music production software and incorporated into an open-access web-based GSM Player; designed and built by the GSM.

This allows users to engage in various depths with the material in line with the Alan Merriam’s classification of ethnomusicological participants, from performers to teachers.

Winners of the Times Higher Education Award for ‘Excellence and Innovation in the Arts’ 2016, GSM have appeared several times on different news programmes including a BBC One Documentary film, interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and BBC World Service. In print features on the GSM have been translated into 8 different languages ensuring international reach. To date the website receives over 15,000 unique users who regularly engage with the research outputs.

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