Acting, Dance, and Performing Arts: Sound

As many items become more freely available online and via YouTube it is easy to forget the wealth of resources held in our own library.  Sound effects, Production Music and Accents are all available on CD from the 2nd floor the Mount Lawley ECU Library.

SFX: Sound effects: 792.024

A large collection of sound effects is housed at 792.024 on Level two of the Mount Lawley Campus Library.

These are catalogued only broadly, by series (eg Jungle Sounds), by author, by production company, etc.

For particular sounds and effects you will need to look at the content notes on the CDs themselves.

These are well worth looking through if you are searching for a particular sound.

Production music: 781.54

Production music is specialised music that is labeled by effect, eg : "Upbeat swing".

These CDs are housed on level two of the Mount Lawley campus Library at 781.54 and you'll need to browse the CDs themselves to locate the particular type of music or mood you are after. 

Copyright

Be aware that using music in your productions may violate Copyright law. When making your work publicly available, check our Creative Commons and Copyright guide for information on acceptable use.

Open Access Sound databases

• British Library Sounds

  Digital archive of 12,000 sound recordings.

• Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

  University of California's archive of digitized cylinder recordings spanning mid-1890s to mid-1920s

• Internet Archive - Audio Archive

  Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings.

• Recording Pioneers

  Who's who of sound recorders from 1878 to 1940.

• US National Jukebox

  More than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925.

  more...

• UbuWeb

  Large educational resource of avant-garde material in the fields of visual, concrete and sound poetry. It also includes film and sound archives.

Creative Commons

Also be aware that there are Creative Commons (CC) materials created and released by their artists for free use (there may be other restrictions, including being limited to Non Commercial use only, or not being available for Derivative use. Check the individual licenses.)

See our Creative Commons and Copyright guide for CC searches.

Subject Headings and Call numbers are useful to know as items are shelved by subject area in our library.

Searching any of these Subject Headings will find you all items (Books / Ebooks, Documentaries, Journal Articles, etc.) related to that topic.

You may also wish to browse each call number (Dewey Decimal Number) as they represent a particular subject, and these numbers can be used to browse the library's physical shelves on Level 4.

Of course, anything we hold in electronic format will not be found by browsing the shelves, but there is still a lot of very valuable information to be found on our shelves.  

You can also use the subject heading to search Library Search which will bring up electronic items as well as hardcopy.

Visit the Advanced Search page on the Library website and enter the exact Subject Heading and select the "Subject" field in the "Search Index"