The Freesound Project
Encyclopedia
The Freesound Project is a repository
of Creative Commons
licensed audio samples
. Sounds uploaded to the website by its users cover a wide range of subjects, from field recording
s to synthesized
sound effect
s. All audio content in the repository is released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, and can be tagged
and browsed by folksonomic
means. (Unmodified samples may not be distributed commercially.) The license used is one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses and is not free enough to be used on Wikipedia, free software programs and other projects requiring free content
. The license fails the Definition of Free Cultural Works
and the Debian Free Software Guidelines
.
The Freesound Project was officially launched on April 5, 2005 in the context of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference
earlier that year. It is a project of the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Bram de Jong is responsible for developing and administrating the Freesound website.
Children of Men
was the first major motion picture known to legally use a sample from Freesound in its production. The sound used was "male_Thijs_loud_scream.aiff" posted by the user thanvannispen, and the film properly attributes the sample in the credits.
The features of freesound are designed to make the sound files on the website easy to index, search, and browse. The Sampling Plus License permits the sampling and/or transformation of all the sounds on the site to create derivative works, even for profit (as long as they are not used to advertise an unrelated product.) Verbatim copying is also permitted. Since the Sampling Plus License stipulates that the authors of the original work must be credited in the derivative work, the site is capable of automatically generating an attribution list to make this easier.
The following web technologies are also used:
Repository (publishing)
A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing,is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles....
of Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
licensed audio samples
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
. Sounds uploaded to the website by its users cover a wide range of subjects, from field recording
Field recording
Field recording is the term used for an audio recording produced outside of a recording studio. The recording is typically recorded in the same channel format as the desired result, for instance, stereo recording equipment will yield a stereo product...
s to synthesized
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
sound effect
Sound effect
For the album by The Jam, see Sound Affects.Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media...
s. All audio content in the repository is released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, and can be tagged
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
and browsed by folksonomic
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
means. (Unmodified samples may not be distributed commercially.) The license used is one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses and is not free enough to be used on Wikipedia, free software programs and other projects requiring free content
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
. The license fails the Definition of Free Cultural Works
Definition of Free Cultural Works
The Definition of Free Cultural Works is the definition of free content put forth by Erik Möller and published on the website .The first draft of the Definition of Free Cultural Works was published 3 April 2006 . Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Angela Beesley and others helped the project...
and the Debian Free Software Guidelines
Debian Free Software Guidelines
The Debian Free Software Guidelines is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian...
.
History
International Computer Music Conference
The International Computer Music Conference is a yearly international conference for computer music researchers and composers. It is the annual conference of the International Computer Music Association ....
earlier that year. It is a project of the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Bram de Jong is responsible for developing and administrating the Freesound website.
Children of Men
Children of Men
Children of Men is a 2006 science fiction film loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel The Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. In 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in England, where the last...
was the first major motion picture known to legally use a sample from Freesound in its production. The sound used was "male_Thijs_loud_scream.aiff" posted by the user thanvannispen, and the film properly attributes the sample in the credits.
Features
- Tagging
- GeoTaggingGeoTaggingGeotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata...
- Sample Packs
- Remix Tree
- Waveform Display
- Flash Preview
- Mootcher Library
- Creative Commons Sampling Plus License
The features of freesound are designed to make the sound files on the website easy to index, search, and browse. The Sampling Plus License permits the sampling and/or transformation of all the sounds on the site to create derivative works, even for profit (as long as they are not used to advertise an unrelated product.) Verbatim copying is also permitted. Since the Sampling Plus License stipulates that the authors of the original work must be credited in the derivative work, the site is capable of automatically generating an attribution list to make this easier.
Software Architecture
The Freesound platform is based on technology developed by the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University.- Similarity searches based on automatically generated semantic descriptors
- WordNetWordNetWordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...
-based taxonomy for "nearest neighbor searching" - Spectral centroidSpectral centroidThe spectral centroid is a measure used in digital signal processing to characterise a spectrum. It indicates where the "center of mass" of the spectrum is...
waveform display
The following web technologies are also used:
- PHPPHPPHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
scripting - MySQLMySQLMySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
database - SmartySmartySmarty is a web template system written in PHP. Smarty is primarily promoted as a tool for separation of concerns.Smarty is intended to simplify compartmentalization, allowing the presentation of a web page to change separately from the back-end...
template engine - getID3 media parser
- phpBBPhpBBphpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board...
message board (with Morpheus message board extras)