College of Music Instrument Collection and Sound Archive (Florida State University)

The Ethnomusicology program at Florida State University (FSU) encompasses a broad spectrum of global contemporary and historical music traditions. It has a strong focus in music from Africa and the African diaspora, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia (especially Indonesia), the Middle East, and Central Asia. FSU has done extensive research in medical ethnomusicology, with a strong focus on music and human rights, the ethnomusicology of film, music and race, gender or ethnicity, music and religion/spirituality, music and children, music and autism, global popular music, jazz, improvisation, multicultural music education, music as identity and resistance, and cognitive, historical and applied ethnomusicology.

The FSU Ethnomusicology Sound and Video Archive contains hundreds original field recordings from all over the world. The archive contains original recordings that were made by student. The archive also includes original concert tapes, recorded on the FSU campus by visiting artists from India, China, Japan, Africa, South America, and by the Word Music Ensembles from the FSU College of Music. The college is continuously working on projects to catalog and digitize all of the recordings.

The college offers a program called ‘Music Iconography’ which describes the study of music through images or representations. The World Music Iconography Archive contains thousands of colour slides of paintings and other types of images taken from music events, dance and music instruments from around the world.

Performance, research, and teaching activities are all supported by a large music instrument collection, an ethnomusicology archive and holdings from the Warren D. Allen Music Library.

The instruments in the archive are not merely stored or exhibited but are used daily in the World Music Ensembles of the College of Music at the Florida State University.