Where copyright permits, everyone can play recordings in the following collections.
- Arthur Morris Jones Africa Collection
- Bach
Hear all the recordings of the Orchestral Suites, Brandenburg Concertos and Keyboard Concertos recorded before 1957. Available only in the UK.
- Beethoven
Compare and contrast performances of Beethoven's string quartets, symphonies and concertos. Available only in the UK.
- Brahms
Hear hundreds of recordings of the Symphonies, Concertos and Overtures made before 1957. Available only in the UK.
- British wildlife recordings
Listen to circa 640 recordings of wildlife from the UK, most published here for the first time.
- Chopin
Listen to circa 1,520 recorded performances of key piano repertoire.
- Colin Huehns Asia Collection
- Decca West African recordings
Approximately 952 recordings from the British Library’s holdings of the Decca West Africa yellow label series, issued on shellac disc between circa 1948-1958.
- Early record catalogues
- Early spoken word recordings
These recordings provide a fascinating review of the era of spoken word audio that preceded the advent of long-playing records and tapes.
- Ethnographic wax cylinders
Listen to circa 244 rare wax cylinder recordings from the World and Traditional Music collections of the British Library Sound Archive. The selection features music, songs and speech from around the world, captured on the first portable recording machines between 1898 and 1915.
- Giles Swayne Senegal Collection
Nearly 20 hours of Jola music recorded in January and February 1982 in The Gambia and Senegal by British composer, Giles Swayne, much of whose work is often directly or indirectly linked to his knowledge and experiences of African music.
- Haydn
Hear most of the Symphonies recorded up to 1957. Available only in the UK.
- ICA talks
More than 1,000 hours of recordings documenting talks and discussions at the ICA during the period 1982-1993. Featuring leading writers, artists and filmmakers, the collection provides a unique survey of the cultural, artistic and social currents of the 1980s.
- James Kippen North India Collection
- Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000. The project was developed with the specialist advice of leading Jewish historians and complements a number of collections held by the Sound Archive on Jewish life in Britain.
- Kenneth Gourlay Uganda Collection
- Klaus Wachsmann Uganda Collection
The "foremost pioneering scholar in African music", Wachsmann made roughly 1,500 unique recordings of indigenous music in Uganda, most of which have never been published before. This collection dates from the late 1940s, when Wachsmann was curator of the Uganda Museum in Kampala, and includes field recordings and performances at the Museum.
- Millennium Memory Bank
Listen to over 350 extracts from the Millennium Memory Bank, one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, recorded by BBC local radio stations during 1998 and 1999.
- Mozart
Listen to most of the symphonies and concertos recorded before 1957. Available only in the UK.
- Music from India
The recordings featured in this collection were made by Rolf Killius as part of a collaborative project between Rolf, The British Library and the Horniman Museum. The aim of the project has been to document folk, devotional and ritual music of rural India.
- Peter Cooke Uganda Collection
Nearly 1,500 recordings made by ethnomusicologist, Peter Cooke, between 1964 and 1997 and covering a broad range of culture groups, genres and instrument types.
- Playback and recording equipment
View over 400 images of more than 90 machines from the British Library Sound Archive's collection of playback and recording devices, charting the history of sound reproduction technology.
- Raymond Firth Tikopia Collection
- Soundscapes
This selection draws together mechanical and industrial sounds (including transport and fog-horns), soundscapes of the natural world across continents, urban soundscapes, and wildlife sounds from around the globe.
- Survey of English Dialects
A collection of 288 extracts taken from recordings made between 1951 and 1974, representing a survey of the vernacular speech of England.
- Traditional music in England
Circa 20,717 field recordings of traditional music including popular ballads, children's skipping songs, customs, music hall, soldiers' songs, folk tales and interviews.