DJALCHEMI

Freesound project: Flickr for sound samples

The freesound project enables people to share sound samples under a 'sampling plus' Creative Commons licence.

The site is clearly heavily indebted to Flickr, which has set the standard for sharing and community facilities for photographs. You can see this in freesound's approach to tags (cf. Flickr tags), comments and forums. One difference is that Flickr allows a broader range of Creative Commons licences, as well as the traditional 'all rights reserved' copyright.

At the time of writing, fewer than seventy people have added sound files to freesound. I've uploaded the two recordings I did for a sonic art course eighteen months ago. One of the smart things about freesound is that, as well as browsing by tags, you can also browse other samples that sound similar to a particular sample. So, from my recording of a Thameslink train journey, you can get a list of similar sounds, which include some 'literally' similar sources (an announcement at a Malaysian airport, a train coming into a Barcelona metro station) and some more laterally connected (oriental sliding strings). A valuable resource for anyone interested in making sound art or mash-ups.