The Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology has moved into a beautiful new space in the Old Arts Building in a partnership with folkwaysAlive!. The new space is home to our famed Moses and Frances Asch Folkways Collection and a sound museum devoted to exploring the world of music. The new Centre also houses a state of the art research lab containing all the equipment that could be needed for collecting, digitising, and analysing field recordings of all kinds. We have continued our efforts at maintenance and preservation of all the Centre collections, which will be stored in a specially designed archival compactor unit. These collections will, as always, be available as a research resource for students and researchers at the University of Alberta.

Resulting from a partnership with Smithsonian Folkways and the diligent work of Centre staff, we now have a digital archive of the entire Folkways collection in addition to the physical LPs. The collection totals nearly 2200 records and all of the music, covers, and liner notes are preserved in an uncompressed, archival quality digital format and are available locally for listeners to browse.

This versatile new space includes a museum space with listening stations where visitors can browse the music, cover images, and liner notes of the Folkways collection. Listeners can search and play back recordings from the entire collection using our custom designed search engine.

We also have a multipurpose soundproof conference room which may be used, for example, as a recording room for in-house field work, producing radio broadcasts, or video conferencing.

Our research lab contains state-of-the-art computers, audio, and video equipment, which along with professional software suites provide an excellent resource for students and researchers to fully explore the many facets of their sound and video recordings.