This group of five young folk musicians became the voice of Morocco in the 1960s and beyond. Martin Scorsese called them “the Rolling Stones of North Africa,” but to Moroccans they were the sound of an entire generation in a charged moment of global pop culture.

Entranced as much by its sound as by its centuries of history, in 2010 Rachel Beckles Willson started playing the `ud (oud), building enough skill to start performing on the instrument. She also became curious about its origins.

For centuries iso-polyphony, a style of folk singing, has chronicled Albanian life. The songs are part of a rich tradition, vital to weddings, funerals, harvests, festivals and other social events. Indeed, a Ministry of Culture official dubs it “the autobiography of a nation,” a means for the preservation and transmission of different stories.  Recently, crowds gathered for the National Folklore Festival in the  “stone city” of Gjirokastër, demonstrating that interest in iso-polyphony remains high. The challenge is getting younger generations to engage. But some are taking up the call.

For more than 10 years, Moroccan native and New York resident Hatim Belyamani has focused his non-profit Remix⟷Culture on offering digital sample and remix tools that give exposure and preserve access for traditional acoustic music around the world.

The Nile river has been used as motif, a metaphor or both in popular culture, most prolifically in music in the United States for more than 125 years. The most notable uses of the Nile arose during the jazz period, which peaked in the second half of the 20th century and continues to this day.

Reaching out to new generations and global audiences, musicians in India's northwest state of Rajasthan draw on centuries of traditions that, to an untrained ear, may sound like Indian classical music. But what sets them apart are the regional stories they tell and the tone and power of the singers.

For more than 4,000 years. people have adopted, adapted and adjusted the lute, resulting in its countless variations. Along the way. some innovations have proved both consequential and simple.

Born in a village in northwest Algeria, Cheika Remitti sang high-energy songs of love, loss and society that pioneered rai music. Beloved by fans for more than 60 years until her death in 2006, her influence and popularity endure.

A musical wave has been swelling for a decade in the German capital, which one local analyst now calls “the city of choice for a new generation of cultural talent from the Middle East and North Africa”—part of the greater demographic shift that has made people of Arab backgrounds Berlin’s fourth-largest ethnic-identity group. In street jams, clubs, studios, concert halls and online, new mixes of musicians are blending notes and ideas into genre-bending, transcultural fusions. “What we as artists in Berlin can do is tear down the borders in our head and invite others to do the same,” says musician Jamila Al-Yousef.

With a lifetime of training from leading sitar virtuosos, Alif Laila is one of few women to achieve international recognition with the mesmerizing instrument whose sound evokes the musical identity of the greater Indian subcontinent. She is as passionate about music as she is about encouraging other women.

It was mainly the pepper in Kerala, at the southwest tip of India, that lured early traders to ride seasonal monsoon winds across the Arabian Sea. With the mariners came music that mixed with Keralan sounds to become the complex, percussion-driven traditions of today’s Mappila culture.

Often regarded as the forerunner and name- sake of the European lute, the ‘ud (oud), is among the world’s oldest continuously played string instruments. In Arab and other musical traditions, its deeply resonant, emotionally evocative tones earned it, over the centuries, the sobriquet amir al-tararb.