Freesound Forums

This may not be a big thing in the grand scheme of things - it's more of a personal journey of improvement. Perhaps it is an ordinary use - after all, it does refer to using sounds from here to compose a soundscape.

I run pen-and-paper RPG sessions for a group of friends and have always found that music helped me set the atmosphere when we played. The score to Blade Runner by Vangelis could provide a wonderful entry to a sweeping cityscape, his "Fields of Coral" in the background added to the sense of wonder that accompanied discovering the past of an old bunker that survived an atomic war.

Over time, my music became more dynamic and I switched between tracks more often. A new campaign began to the beat of "Blood on my Name" by Brothers Bright, with the brash first chorus setting the scene as our valiant players grabbed their guns to fight land pirates Mad Max style.

There's always something, in my mind, I could do to crank it up even more, go to eleven - and I found out what I lacked - sound. The most basic droning ambiences of a starship deck found here on Freesound, punctuated by footsteps and taps of a keyboard breathed more life to the first location - the mobile base of our team.

Its eventual "final flight" to wrap up the story over a year in the making, began with the opening of Ace Combat 4's "Megalith" with the whine of miniguns blasting away, with deliberate variance between left/right channels, swamping the table in make-believe gunfire from the side galleys as the team made their bombing run to victory.

The table was grinning like little kids as they dove right into a tale of worlds far away. I, myself, felt the GM's pride of having brought them what they came here for - an imaginary movie in which they are the stars. Over the course of those few sessions I discovered that sound does not need to accompany a moving picture - it can help create it in the mind of those listening to it.

That realization inspired me to crank it up a notch once more, and I have just finished my very first electronics project build from scratch - complete with home-etched PCBs - a mixer with volume sliders and a crossfader for music.

So yeah, a milestone in my life as an electronic hobbyist and our best to Freesound - from the Rooftop Roleplayers!

TLDR: Freesound actually changed my life.

I believe I've told some of this before, but first of all I cannot credit Freesound enough for taking me down a totally new career path. Once upon a time I was a camera operator doing educational and documentary work, I was fortunate enough to get to travel to some interesting places and I began to record more and more sounds. I had done music recording in college, but it was not until Freesound that I actually discovered the term "field recording" and I quickly realized the mistake I had made going down the camera path. In any case I was recording a lot and I wasn't sure what to do with the recordings so I started contributing here as sort of a creative outlet. I also had a lot of various sound making machines/synths and I started recording those. I had always been a bad musician but I was much more comfortable making sounds rather than music, as much as those are difficult to differentiate sometimes. Along the way I convinced my then-partner to start doing her voice recordings which became surprisingly popular for quite some time (and to this day I still get occasional requests for her voice). One particular standout that came from that was her voicing a sex doll in some big theatrical production put on in London.
A couple other highlights:
My sound shivvle (https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/sounds/51425/) became the base of a song called Shimmer by Dauwd (https://soundcloud.com/dauwd/shimmer)

I forget which light rail recording it is, but I was totally surprised to hear one of my own recordings in a song by a musician I really like Make Out Magic, by Module (https://module.bandcamp.com/track/make-out-magic)

Another surprise was coming across the song Agave Ferox by Jet Jaguar, another musician I really like, and in a rare instance actually gave me correct credit: https://jetjag.bandcamp.com/album/many-things

I've lost track of a lot of interesting things, one ambience I created was used as the music for an ad for an escort service in Germany, an actor screaming I recorded is now being used in a children's exhibit at the Melbourne art museum.

The last location sound job I had, the editor realized he had just used my bicycle freewheel sound (https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/sounds/74792/) and had a funny moment when he realized he knew who I was.

Perhaps my favorite thing though is the relationship I've created with one user in particular, I don't really know anything about them, but for some reason they were quite taken by some of my work, and would give me prompts to create sounds. This has been going on for several years at this point and I would say it is my source for a lot of the synthetic drones/textures/ambiences that I create.

For all these things and countless more I am thankful for Freesound.

Edit to add: I can't believe I forgot this one. Someone was doing a worst sound competition or something and stumbled across my sound "blarg" (https://freesound.org/people/tim.kahn/sounds/67887/). That somehow lead to a short segment on NPR's All Things Considered https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496226369/trying-to-make-the-worst-sound-in-the-world

i was editing my senior project and used like 500 sounds lol

My experiences with Freesound may not be as life-changing as some of the others here but I always enjoy it when people use my recordings and samples in whatever they create: a recording, a game, an art installation etc. It is simply wonderful how a sound can travel from my little recorder into e.g. a course 'German language for foreigners' where it is used to illustrate German traditions (https://freesound.org/people/LG/sounds/142295/). There are other nice uses, too.

Freesound introduced me to the world of field recordings. Over those thirteen years that I've been contributing, I've slowly morphed the act of recording into a kind meditation. You can't just snap a recording like you do with a picture, you have to wait until it is done. And so I sit down with my recorder and shut up for a moment - no movement, no talking, just listening and slowly dissolving (mentally...) into the world. That is what Freesound did for me.

Great if other users like to use my sounds but I already had my fun when making the recordings. Positive comments, usage in other projects etc. are a bonus.

Nowadays I have less time to sort through everything and to upload. But once in a while, there will be a new batch for FS' servers

I teach an Intro to Working With Audio class at the University of Washington Bothell. Every day we start class with a What's That Sound exercise, where I play a sound and students have to guess what they're listening to, what time of day it is, whether or not it's an indoor or outdoor sound, etc. Freesound is where I find almost every single sound that I use for this exercise!

I also used Freesound audio to create a very scary loop that I used to play on my porch at Halloween. I'd hide the speakers in the clothing of some headless porch sitters, and it would scare the crap out of trick-or-treaters. Groans, growls, whispers, children singing, chains dragging, and screams!

We are using Freesound audio files for a MediaWiki site being designed to offer users a way to experience the world's most famous train routes.

Our goal is to maintain a sizable user-generated database of videos, text and images archiving virtual railroad journeys.

Freesound has been instrumental in helping us find meditation/relaxation sounds to supplement the long videos, some of which exceed three hours in length. These are videos of authentic immersive railway adventures, providing users the ability to watch moving scenery from the train's window, explore the interior of the cabins, visit the many rest stops along the way, and read historical and cultural information related to the routes and locations. For much of the footage we have, we needed to replace the original source audio with music, and we opted to use Creative Commons sounds for this purpose. A big chunk of those sounds have come from Freesound.

For example, the route we are working on at the moment is the entire length of the Trans-Mongolian Railway. There are dozens of hours of video containing landscapes and scenery viewed from the window of the train, and since we were unable to get decent source audio of the moving train's natural sounds, we instead used several hours of relaxation and meditation music from this site and others.

Our wiki is still not finished, but you can check it out here:

https://triadtravelogues.com/wikirailroad/Main_Page

Just click on any point along the Trans-Mongolian Railway map on that page and you'll see how we've used Freesound audio files.

You guys are awesome, thanks for everything you do!

Thanks for such amazing stories
Just linking to a couple more here that were posted as comments in the blog instead of here:
- https://blog.freesound.org/?p=1006#comment-56646
- https://blog.freesound.org/?p=1006#comment-56743

Hello there and thank you for this thread. We are new YouTubers with a tiny micro-budget. However, you wouldn't know it thanks to freesound.
We mainly use your sound effects to add to our original scary stories on our YouTube channel. We keep getting compliments about how engaging our content is. Hopefully, we can make you guys at Freesound proud. Didn't want to spam this thread but if you're interested, just follow our channel link located in our profile bio. thanks again for the great and generous work you guys do.

100% of the sound effects in my feature film, "Oops, I Murdered the Person the Person I Like Likes" came from freesound.

The movie is the first screen adaptation of Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedie" - the play Shakespeare ripped off when writing Hamlet! It's also made entirely out of cardboard!

Uh, I still haven't donated any money to you. Sorry about that. To make up for that, here is a link to the movie: https://vimeo.com/rossozarka/oopsprivate

The password is "JUSTDESERTS" - enjoy!

And yes, everyone who made a sound effect I used is credited!

It might sound silly, but I just love sounds. I listen to them like music. It's crazy I know. Sometimes I just like to bring up a sound and hear the texture of it.

In 2014, I uploaded CC0 scratching samples for people who wants to make music like I did in my Hip-Hop eJay age (when I was teenager at the end of 90's, it was my first music making contact)

Last year, I saw a Netflix documentary ("Fresh dressed", 2015) and I realized that they used one of my scratching samples for the background music. (Actually, they used another sample from me as well, but this last one is just a famous already-made sample with a kick)

These samples are:

The scratching sample: https://freesound.org/people/Bronxio/sounds/238727/
The other sample: https://freesound.org/people/Bronxio/sounds/238334/

About in minute 19, you can hear both samples triggered right after Damon Dash says "So, it's just a status symbol based on insecurity". The scratching sample go throughout the background song (but you can hear it complete just a few times, maybe just one, with a filter).

Didn't expect this. But cool to see how far it can get.

From time to time, I was developing new sound technologies, dedicated to support so called "consciousness exploration". Those who are familiar with The Monroe Institute and their Hemi-Sync programs - know what I talk about.

Freesound helped me to create one one of such technologies, which I call Nabra-Sync 4D. Actually it started with one of sound samples from @tim.kahn - thanks again!

I work in a planetarium, and we use FreeSound for many of our SFX. So for all the contributors here, you might one day fly (virtually) through the rings of Saturn and hear collisions that sound familiar, or land on an exoplanet and recognise the noises there!

I don't know if this counts as out of the ordinary, but freesound.org has basically changed my life. I'm a visual artist mainly working in projection mapping and animation. Having audio added to my pieces adds a whole new dimension, making animations seem more realistic and interesting. For the past few years, I have used audio from freesound to make soundscapes for my projects. I'm unsure what I would have done otherwise as I don't have a budget to buy thousands of dollars worth of folly libraries or to hire music composers. Can't thank everyone that helps maintain this site and uploads their creations to it.

I once needed a hentai moan and gone here. Thanks @guinefurrie
Why?
I had a vocal cover from my brave
idiot
friend which hovered Allj song named Hologram and the lyrics said something like "I'm an pro, let's load hentai on our drives" and inserted a single moan there lol.

My name is Ken Langella and I can tell you a freesound story.

It all began 4 years ago in college when I became a BFA in the Media Arts program at the University of Montana. I had very few friends at the time being an older student and needed a great deal of help from anywhere that i could find it...I am a Video game developer, A one man show, there are probably not many of us with all of the large game companies but we are still here guys...Anyway One day after wondering where I was ever going to find sound material, I found you site...Your site has a pretty wide variety of sounds so I looked through them and found several that suited me..That following week I demoed my game in front of my class, a Sonic arts major liked what she saw and joined forces with me helping me to develop my VR game which has now taken me 2 years to complete....And if you look back at it all, your sounds are what got that dream team started....Well done you guys....you are simply excellent...Ps, If I manage to sell a billion games......this story gets even better...

I had a nice coincidence, once.

I needed a quick little disco beat for a film I was working on so searched freesound for simply "Disco". There were many results, of course, but I chose just one. When I went to download it, I recognised the user's name. Turned out to be a friend of mine!

THIS TALK WAS RECORDED BY A FRIEND IN London and all fully ideological, without any business.
Warm greetings from Gunnar Larson in Sweden

I have been exploring freesound.org since it first started, I think its an incredible example of digitalised aural culture and its significance grows every day. Thankyou to MTG for supporting and developing Freesound for all.

One use case I would like to share is relatively recent.

I have written an app which explores the idea of text sonification, accessing the Freesound API in Java. It was inspired by the news sonification imagined by Jonathan Lethem in his novel 'Gun With Occasional Music'

I am using the app as a research tool. I am interested in the way multiple impressions and perpectives on meaning emerge through the process of non-literal sonification from tokens (words) looking up into the freesound database.

The sounds are retrieved by first reducing or generating text into closed-class words - that means stripping away prepositions like 'the', 'and' etc - then searching the freesound database for tags or mentions of the search word. The results are then streamed from the website, with some kind of overlap related to duration.

I think the results are often varied and very interesting especially when a static text is used to index the database.

Here is just one random example which sonifies from news headlines - it is different everytime, although sometimes a kind of consistency emerges.

https://youtu.be/rNobp_9nr3U

If anyone would like to see some generative Haiku and other examples, let me know and I can try to capture some more.

Thanks!!!