The Freesound Blog

Ariadna from Sons de barcelona (Sounds of Barcelona) let me know that their “Barcelona Sound Project” got its deadline extended until the 27th of April!

“The Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona started in 2008 the project Sons de Barcelona (Sounds of Barcelona) in order to offer to everybody a database of sounds of this city created in a collaborative way, with the contribution of the citizens themselves and integrated into the international project freesound.org, also from MTG. The sounds are recordings of acoustic environments of Barcelona or different sounds generated in very different ways by the users, and published under Creative Commons License (so they can be freely re-used again). The Sounds of Barcelona team conducts workshops addressed to different collectives in order to propagate the use of audio technologies, to teach how to take advantage of all their possibilities, and to awake an interest towards working with sounds.

The aim of this call is to activate, to promote, and to support works related to the sound sphere of the city of Barcelona and it is addressed to everybody interested in make their projects known. “

Hello everyone,

I thought you might be interested in coming to this summer school!

Best regards,

emilia

We are pleased to announce the 2009 Summer School in Sound and Music Computing & SID Training School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds.

It will take place in Casa Da Música, Porto, Portugal, July 18th-21st, 2009, just before the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference.

The theme of this summer school is Interacting with Sounds of Porto. This summer school will explore the potential of recording, processing, sharing and interacting with city sounds.

During 4 days, the program will include lectures, as well as hands-on practical sessions under the supervision of tutors who will provide one-to-one mentoring on artistic and/or scientific projects focused on interactions with sounds that reflect the city of Porto and its activities. Speed talks and poster sessions will also be organized for students to present and receive feedback on their current research, and to foster scientific cross-fertilization.

Lectures and teachers

1. Design of new interfaces for musical expression . Marcelo Wanderley.
2. Registering the soundscape. Joel Chadabe.
3. Sound edition, description and retrieval, social networks. Xavier Serra.

Tutors and proposed topics

1. Jean-Julien Aucouturier (Topic: Hearing objects)
2. Stephan Baumann (Topic: UrbanSync: back in Porto)
3. Eoin Brazil (Topic 1: Porto sound shaker. Topic 2: Porto Mobile Sound Wall. Topic 3: Porto fact-oid mutlimedia kiosk)
4. Bram de Jong (Topic: Porto in Freesound)
5. Luis Gustavo Martins (Topic: Automatic segmentation, classification and clustering of sounds of Porto for tangible interaction)
6. Rui Penha (Topic: Interfaces and algorithms for Casa da Mùsica robotic Gamelan)
7. Stefania Serafin and Federico Fontana (Topic: Natural interactive walking in Porto)

Dates

April 24th / Deadline for application (see details on the web)

May 12th / Notification of acceptance

There will be a registration fee of 200€ to the Summer School. The COST Action IC0601 on Sonic Interaction Design will provide financial help to a selection of students under the form of individual fixed grants of 500 Euros (preference will be given to students whose proposal projects best fit SID topics -see here).

Summer School students are also encouraged to attend the Sound and Music Computing Conference (23-25th July 2009). There will be special (lower) conference fees for Summer School students.

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

Stay tuned on the summer school and conference news:

• RSS feed: http://smc2009.smcnetwork.org/news/news/RSS .
• Facebook group: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42958077160 .
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/smc2009

A while ago Laura from Happy New Ears/Sonokids contacted me to see if we were interested in working together with them. Happy New Ears is a “new music” (lot’s of experimental things going on) festival in Kortrijk/Belgium.

She has proposed us to have the community of Freesound create sounds to load into the Omni (link in dutch, but with pictures) installation for kids and grownups all alike. It looks like a giant mushroom with buttons on top you can hit. If you hit a button a sound is played (see below for images). Of course we were immediately interested, and we hope the community likes the idea as well. Freesounds in a giant, colorful mushroom, being hit by kids? Talk about a psychedelic experience.

We’ve received some tech specs from the creators who have told us that sounds need to be shorter than 3 seconds, and need to be wav, 16bit, stereo. As you can see in the pictures the Omni has 108 pads, separated in 4 pizza slices of 27 sounds. I propose that anyone who wants to create sounds for the Omni creates 27 sounds, named 1 to 27, tagged with “sonokids-omni”, uploaded and added to one sound pack (so I can easily download them). Start counting at the top of the Omni-slice and go down in regular writing sense (i.e. 1, then 2,3, then 4,5,6,7, …). Deadline: 12th of September.

We will ask the people who built the Omni to cycle through the various packs during the 3 days the Omni will be accessible: September 19th, 20th and 21st.

( Photos © Deen van Meer )

If you are from Belgium (or from around here), and provide some sounds, we will try to get you in for free. I’ll point Laura to this post and let’s see if she agrees to that. Also, all sounds will be attributed on the day they are used. I.e. there will be a paper saying who made the sounds of the day!

We had known for a while, but were sworn to secrecy (queue spy music). Now that it’s out we can say it as well: we got an honorary mention at the very prestigious Prix Ars Electronica 2008! Our friends over at reactable (another UPF / MTG project) got the Golden Nica, the highest honor at ars electronica, for which we congratulate them and will give them a big hug next week!!!

Meanwhile we’ve started Sons de Barcelona, a local sound project concerning freesound, sounds in general and Barcelona. The focus of this project will be field-recordings in Barcelona, coupled with workshops for younger kids. If you read Catalan and/or are located in Catalunya, you should really have a look!

On the 15th and 16th of April Jaume Ferrete and me will be giving a talk and workshop on Freesound at the Jornadas de Conocimiento Libre (”days of free/libre knowledge”) in Madrid, Spain. In the talk (in Spanish) we will give an overview of Freesound, it’s history, growth and some rather interesting examples of how Freesound has affected various lives all around the world. The workshop (“Sonic micronarratives; identity in FreeSound”, in English) will evolve around how recording sounds - like taking pictures - is a brief view into the personal world of the recorder an how this micro-vision - as opposed to the controlled macro-vision called TV - is currently shaping the internet and our lives.

If you live near Madrid, come join us!

http://www.esp.uem.es/jcl08/