Musical Instruments : Home
Online Reference
The following online reference resources contain information on a broad range of instruments. Try searching for yours!
- Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (UW-Licensed)Extensive encyclopedia articles with bibliographies, audio examples, and images.
- National Music Museum (free Web)The National Music Museum is located on the University of South Dakota-Vermillion campus. Browse their website's virtual tours and instrument checklists for photographs, descriptions, and historical information on a wide range of instruments.
- Oxford Music Online (UW-Licensed)Contains Grove Music Online, The Oxford Companion to Music, and The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Find extensive encyclopedia articles and bibliographies here!
- Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary (free Web)A collaboration between the Virginia Tech Department of Music and Virginia Tech Learning Technologies. Find audio clips and technical descriptions of instruments here!
About This Guide
The Musical Instruments Research Guide suggests resources for researching the history, cultural contexts, and mechanics of musical instruments. Resources contain not only text, but often also images, audio, and video.
This home page contains broad resources that apply to a wide range of instruments. For selected resources tailored to categories of instruments, please use the tabs in red along the top of this page. Hover over the drop-down menus within the tabs to find sub-pages relevant to specific instruments.
*This guide is still under construction. Please feel free to look around at what information we have so far, but there will be more coming, so stop by again soon!*
Article Databases (UW-Licensed)
Besides encyclopedia articles, you may also want to find articles in magazines or journals.
The following are article databases especially relevant to this topic that cover popular and scholarly journals from a range of time periods and countries.
- International Index to Music Periodicals (IIMP)Scholarly and popular. Magazine and journal articles and reviews. Most entries contain links to full text.
- Music Index OnlineScholarly and popular. 1973-present, over 850 music periodicals from over 40 countries. Includes book reviews, obituaries, news periodicals, and news and articles about music, musicians, and the music industry. No full text.
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (RILM)Mostly scholarly. Journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Some full text.
