The Lullaby Exchange

The UCC Creative Lullaby Exchange is dedicated to one of the world’s most widely practiced yet obscure musical artforms: lullabies. Lullabies are universal: every known culture makes use of them and despite cultural or linguistic differences, both infants and adults respond to familiar and foreign lullabies. Lullabies are practical. Born of instinct, sung in hushed tones for an audience of one, they are not sung by professionals, they are not rehearsed, or performed, and rarely are they recorded and marketed. Lullabies are diverse: despite their ubiquity, few lullabies are known beyond certain cultural groups or even individual families. Lullabies transmit specific cultural knowledge from mythology and religion to politics and mental health. Lullabies exist in a liminal space, outside the mainstream of public attention, on the ill-defined boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, mythology and history, and language and babble. 

The UCC Creative Lullaby Exchange is meant to be a space for sharing and learning about this as-yet unknown wealth of music and culture. We encourage you to browse the lullabies on this site. Perhaps you’d like to learn some for your own use or perhaps you’re just curious to hear a variety of lullabies. The lullabies on this site can be searched in a number of ways so that you may explore them depending on thematic or musical material, geographic area with which they are associated, language, and keywords. We encourage you to record a lullaby you know and leave some information about it so others may learn from you and the resource this website provides may grow. Submissions may be made anonymously.

Find out more about The Lullaby Exchange project: