sounds, music – soundtransit
what is the difference between music and sound? what makes certain sounds music? what makes you listen to certain sounds or music?
do you realize how much sound you filter out in any given situation? do you hear the car passing by? the hum of the air-conditioning?
some sounds are dying out, becoming extinct. some people go out to record and preserve them. the theme of a movie called One Fine Spring Day, as the act of bringing two people together, connecting them, through unaware sounds.
The movie will bore most people senseless. No concealing this. However, some will _feel_ the movie. Its anguish, attempts at capturing happiness, efforts not appreciated, lingers of the past.
this idea of collecting sounds, of fonography, now amplified by the internet, called soundtransit. a website carrying different soundscapes from different parts of the world, backed by a creative commons license that enables and stimulates sharing and reusing – as the ties that bind us together, a concept worth preserving.
August 14th, 2005 at 9:55 pm
ambient music is good for teaching oneself to listen to sounds as music. the serendipity involved in, say, listening to the orb in the middle of tokyo, and having the city’s sounds blend into the album – it’s precious.
as for soundtransit, one glaring oddball thing i saw is that the “search” feature is purely text-keyword based. (aside from artist search, etc.) with a little bit of work, they should let you allow wav or mp3 files (smaller than 500kb, for example), do analysis, and let you find similar sounds. and once they have a zillion sounds, they could do an “audiomosaic” – recreate the sound i upload using the sounds in the current database. then i’d be able to make a cover of a new order song using nature sounds, for example.
August 14th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
sweet idea, how to decide whether sounds are similar? you analyze a wave pattern and see how different it is?
August 15th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
i guess that’s one way. i don’t know much about audio analysis. i’m guessing there must be enough research out there for doing diff types of comparisons on audio signals.
another related idea would be to do a soundtransit radio. provide an mp3 stream, 24/7. have the server create ambient loops, using samples in the database of sounds. it doesn’t have to be too smart or too random – just program into the code some notion of repetition and rhythm. and maybe let me set some params, either specific (volume, bpm) or abstract (“peaceful” vs “violent”, “deserted island” vs “busy cityscape”).
August 15th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
actually, the way to go would be to provide an api to the database, just like flickr. the ideas i’m describing could be implemented by third party folks, just like people make cool browsing apps for flickr using the flickr api.