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!
