Freesound Forums

Hey sound addicts, I was reading the 'about freesound' page, and notice this:

"We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn't been a solution."

is there any scientific research going on via freesound? I searched but found nothing - am I overlooking something that staring me in the face?

Would like to know more about what developments forum members are privy to, and what audio could be useful to scientists.

You need a lot of context for scientific research. And researchers would do well to consider some of the established collections such as the British Library

http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wild.html#access

That's not to say freesound isn't applicable to this at all, but the amount of extra detail needed is probably a bit much for many contributors. Researchers are probably already aware of the British Library wildife sound collection, and the extensive US archive at Cornell, the Macaulay library

There's Olivier from MTG who's doing his phd work on the sounds/tags gathered in freesound.

Then there's a student from CMU and another student from MIT who are using freesound for research right now... I hope they will come onto the forum and tell you about the research somewhere in the future.

You might not *see* it all the time, but the research is there

We (=MTG) also use freesound's sounds to learn about sound similarity.

- bram

ermine
You need a lot of context for scientific research. And researchers would do well to consider some of the established collections such as the British Library

www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wild.html#access

The British Library is fine if you have the time and resources to go there and access to the collection directly, or if you're happy with a limited online corpus which is all in (for some inexplicable reason) in Windows Media format.

What seems to be happening with freesound is that the researchers behind it are getting a vast tagged library to research; perhaps it's harder to do specific research on say the scratching sounds of fire ants, but it's a very good way of, for example, researching global rhythms.

Hello everybody,

although this thread is rather old, I take the opportunity to say "Thank you!" for helping a "researcher" to do his science. I am currently concerned with laughter in HRI (Human Robot Interaction) and very grateful for the many author's here, who have posted their nice recordings.

A question: Would it be OK if I used the sounds to let our Robots produce (audible) laughter? What/how could I give credit? The laughter files downloaded here would not be the only ones I use, but they might eventually make approx. 10% in the end.

Sincerely yours,
wumpus

PS: And thanks for all the fish..

Are there any anthropologists reading the forums or using the cultural sounds posted here for research? It would seem that the database could be very useful for cultural studies.

Nokosoma (Bill)