Who says the internet is dead? Not Freesound, the massive, community-run, fully free and open library of sounds from birdsong to samples. This incredible repository turns 20 years old today, and they’re celebrating with talks and a listening session. That includes organizer discussions of how to cope with AI and keep users’ needs central, and talks ranging from tech to urban planning to Palestinian field recordings, plus a listening session of selected award-winning compositions from the community.
Freesound was born in the same Internet CDM was, roughly, getting its start in April 2005 just as this site was gathering steam. (The 15th anniversary hit the date; this year they’re celebrating through 2025 — well-deserved!) The project was born at the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra who still manage the project.
There’s a great set of highlights. Still ahead, just to pencil drop on a few – their freesound accounts are linked:
- Mohammad Balawneh from sounds_from_palestine, a project I’ve covered before, starts the noon set
- Anna Xambó Sedó (sensingtheforest) talks about the project, “Sensing the Forest: Exploring Climate Change Through Soundscape Datasets from DIY Streamers at Alice Holt Forest”
- Joan in B flat: “Salir de la caja: remplazar todo tipo de VST como Omnisphere por samples mas personalizados”
- Craig Smith (craigsmith) Preserving & Sharing Classic Hollywood Sound Effects
- Rutger Muller, Nikolai Gillissen, Ricky van Broekhoven are presenting “Soundsystem for Silence – Creating Immersive Spaces with Emergent Patterns”
And then you can wind down your evening (Europe) or mid-day (Americas) or… start your morning (Pacific) with the 20th anniversary composition contest listening session, featuring the winning pieces of the contest, and a selection from the other submissions. That’s at 20:00 CDT. (Times are listed as CET, but Europe just turned its clocks back so for instance subtract 5 hours for Eastern time.)
Freesound Day programme, October 28th, Barcelona and online
Rutger’s program, for instance:
Join in
Instructions for joining — including if you’re around the campus in Barcelona, you can pop in in person!
- If you are attending the event in person, please register following this link: https://eventum.upf.edu/139645/detail/freesound-day.html (attendance is free). The event happens at Sala Aranyó of the Campus del Poblenou of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain.
- If you are attending remotely, all you need to do is to join this Zoom meeting room: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/j/93968998691 (the room will be open 15 minutes before the start of the event)
I hope at least some of these will be archived and available; I’ll share any that are.
Oh, and as CDM also celebrates roughly 20 years, I was curious when I first wrote about this project. That’ll be a little over a year and a month after launch, in April 2006:
Free, Geotagged Sound Samples from Around the World
At the time, there were approximately 17,000 samples; now, the number is in the hundreds of thousands, with 50-60 terabytes of data downloaded every month and 40-50k downloads daily.
It’s especially interesting how AI is impacting Freesound, too. For instance, I’m listening to the administrator talk about a jump in traffic from ChatGPT directing readers to the site — recommending the tool.