Freesound Forums

Hello there,
As you may or may not know, there's the map feature with geotagged sounds ! https://freesound.org/browse/geotags/?c_lat=24&c_lon=20&z=2
I encourage you to :
A) Check it out! It can be interesting to hear the difference in ambiance between different countries, the different birds etc...
B) Record something yourself! A park, city center, local forest/wildlife/river. Even with just your phone!
It's never truly silent! So busy or quiet, it's always interesting to have!

It can be useful for research (frequency of cars, bikes, trucks, drones, a kind of bird, etc...) or simply for future generations to look back at what their hometown sounded like 50years ago (don't you wonder how the streets sounded like with the first cars? Or horses? Or an old accent?).
There's so many photographs of a place, google maps has almost every place, tourism got touristic place hundreds of times. But an audio recording is a missing piece of the puzzle you could fill in!

Even if there's already a recording comparing time or day of the week, or progression throughout the year is valuable!

So yeah get out there and record your local place! Someone out there will appreciate it!
You could even share your recording link here, it would please me to know if following this post, just one person got out and recorded something where a village/town was missing a recording

This is great - I've always wanted a feature like this! I've been a member for a few years, but now have recording equipment to contribute to this project.

A smartphone is good as well. Just experiment.

ChristianSW wrote:
This is great - I've always wanted a feature like this! I've been a member for a few years, but now have recording equipment to contribute to this project.

klankbeeld wrote:
A smartphone is good as well. Just experiment.

Yes, you are absolutely right! As a teenager, I had a portable cassette recorder that I carried in my backpack. I was first interested in bird songs, and that's how I became aware of field recordings.

If you ever find one of those casettes, please share them
The color of the casette with knowing its a old thing must be a lovely vibe and a golden nugget!

Sadiquecat wrote:
If you ever find one of those casettes, please share them
The color of the casette with knowing its a old thing must be a lovely vibe and a golden nugget!

I'd love to do that! Hope I will find these.

Interesting idea, I didn't know this was relevant here, and I am primarily a field recordist. I am interested in the idea of how the sound of places change over time

I use aporee for this sort of thing, which is specifically location field recording.

This is a bit more fuzzy here - I was puzzled to see

https://freesound.org/people/SystemShock79/sounds/592030/

and

https://freesound.org/people/weaverfishable/sounds/151708/

Absolutely nothing wrong with the sounds, but it's not clear to me that they're specifically associated with Weymouth and Bridport. Perhaps this is where the artists are located. Maybe there's an easy way to screen geolocated and field-recording, but otherwise the map is interesting but not targeted to that use.

I didn't know about Aporee, thanks for pointing it out!
I, I have mixed feelings about the fact there's more tagged recordings than here, feels like I was blind xD

It's indeed a pity some not very location dependent sounds are geotagged here. Though, we can "negative" filter things like "synth" "beat" etc...

I guess we could come up with a list of them to better navigate the map along with "positive" filters.

Cheers!

As a field recordist I guess aporee is more tuned to my interests, but I think Freesound has its own part to play. I drifted away from freesound because of this different emphasis, but I see changes have been made that make the remit wider, and easier to filter.

Two things would improve the map from that point of view:

A way to screen results. I'd say a simple tick-box "sounds tagged field-recordings only" would go a long way to resolving that. Philosophically a field recording is an event in space and time, there's a sort of implication it is not overly processed - indeed aporee's instructions to recordists sum up the essentials well

don't mess with time and location, origin of place, its ambience and the passing of time are important

A second change which is important for field recordings and historical ones particularly, is a way of entering the recording date and time. I've tried to add this for mine, but it's free-form and in the description so of limited use. There's clearly a big difference in a woodland recording in April at 7am compared to the same woodland in an October afternoon.

I don't really understand how he's done it, but klankbeeld has done great work with field recordings - both adding pictures and related material today. They seem to use part of the title/filename for recording date/time metadata.

Freesound is of course about much more than field recording, but those changes would help handle this specific area of interest