The Freesound Blog

Hello everyone.

I will be one of the tutors in the Sound and Music Computing (SCM) Summer School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds. It will take place at the Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal, from July 18 to 21, 2009. The topic of this summer school is audio/field recording and processing/analysis of those sounds.

The main teachers will be Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation), Marcelo Wanderley (McGill University, Montreal) and Xavier Serra (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain). Other tutors include Jean-Julien Acouturier, Stephan Baumann, Eoin Brazil, Federico Fontana, Luis Gustavo Martins, Rui Penha and Stefania Serafin.

Students can register to participate to the upcoming SMC Summer School by making an application. Summer school student grants will be provided by the COST Action IC0601 on Sonic Interaction Design.

Application deadline: 24th April.

More info: http://smcnetwork.org/summerschool/porto2009

After 3 years of using the rather long and confusing “freesound.iua.upf.edu” URL, we have finally convinced ourselves and the university that we needed a new domain. Starting effectively now, The Freesound Project get’s a new url:

http://www.freesound.org

(We will also stop refering to Freesound as “The Freesoud Project” but will rather switch to saying “Freesound dot org”.)

A few words about this domain name. After a long debate we decided we would buy the domain from buydomains.com. Buydomains.com (deliberately not turned into a link!) is one of those companies that makes money from buying domains on the web, holding them ransom and then selling them for a very high price. Depending on your view this might be called cybersquatting (although I don’t like the name as I have respect for squatters) or just plain extorsion: freesound.org was bought for the sum of 4073€.

Once Nightingale is up, we will have one of those nice “donate until we get to this sum” meters so the community can pay up to half of that. That way we can say that the Freesound.org domain is owned by the community. If we had done it the other way around (ask the community for half, then buy the domain), someone would have outsmarted us by buying the domain and increasing the price even more.

It was about time to make our support for Freesound even more official and give it an even stronger personality. We have also started a new initiative which will be hosted under the name http://barcelona.freesound.org/ and we are hoping that we will be able to start (or perhaps others will start!) other local initiatives related to sounds and sound recording. More news about barcelona.freesound.org soon!

Who is behind Freesound? Well, less people than you would think! Not all of them are as visible as the others (look who is talking, googling my own name gives me the creeps!), but all of them are an invaluable part in the working of things.

Xavier Serra: Xavier is the big boss, the director of MTG. The evil ( just kidding Xavier ) mastermind behind the audio research center called MTG which has produced many cool things like Vocaloid, Reactable, Freesound and many other cool projects. I highly recommend you to check out MTG’s website and have a good look at all the projects they spawned.

Bram de Jong: Smartelectronix, MusicDsp.org, ICMC2005, Splicemusic, Freesound. There’s some things to google.

Jordi Funollet: MTG and IUA’s system administrator. The only guy who gets excited and happy if power supplies start glowing red. Ooooh, look, so many people on freesound!! I hope we get slashdotted next!! Imagine the cool graphics it will produce in my logging!

Greg Kellum: Greg worked on something behind the scenes, but something very important. In 2007 he worked on the way files were named in Freesound so that mirroring would be possible. Mirroring is the process by which content is spread out over different servers around the world to lighten the heavy load of the poor freesound machines.

Gerard Roma: Gerard has been silently working away on his Freesound Radio program. He is one of the poor Master in Information, Communication and Audiovisual Media Technologies (TICMA) students who was too techy for his own good and got swept along in the rush of Freesound. I’ve been trying to get Gerard more involved in Freesound one bit at a time. He is also one of the Freesound moderators.

Anton, Erdie, Halleck, plagasul: 4 brave freesound moderators. When you (you know who you are!) write a bad description on a file, upload an illegal file or a broken file, these are the guys that weed them out! Moderation is done in a semi-anonymous way where each moderator is presented with random files, so… don’t hold it against any of them if your file is flagged “bad description!”

The Essentia team: the guys that worked on the sound similarity algorithms. Although they are not directly involved with Freesound, I can’t count the number of times that Koppi or Nicolas helped me with database an/or C++ problems So, they are kind of responsible for all of this as well!