Freesound Forums

Nature Sound Generator / Relaxing Sound Generator http://www.backsounds.co.uk

Dear all,

I have developed some software that can model sounds of nature and other ambient sounds. It uses a fairly simple mathmatical probability model to determine which sounds play where, when and at which volume and frequency.

It's become a pet project over the past few months, and I have spent far too much time working on it. I'm very pleased with the results and have used a number of the fantastic sounds from this website (all hopefully attributed correctly.)

For example, I have layered and modelled a number of nature samples from Acclivity and genghis attenborough to recreate a summer garden and a jungle soundscape. I have also bought "UncleSigmund"'s clock back to life and combined it with acclivity's wind and rain on a window and log fire to recreate a country lodge.

I have run out of time now and have other ideas to work on, but others on this forum might have fun creating their own soundscapes - if you have one to share, let me know and I'll upload the definition to our server.

Please have a look and let me know what you think - my wife thinks I'm mad...

Thanks for your time, and thanks again to all of the great contributors on here.

Best wishes

Paul

http://www.backsounds.co.uk

No you are not mad Paul,

that's a great idea. I was looking on your attributions page, are you supposed to list the specific sounds you have used or is this in the software?

Anyway, keep it up...I'll download and have a play later today.

digifish

Where are we on commercial use as this is basically triggering cc licensed sounds randomly, not a compostion but a commercial reproduction. Just curious. Looks problematic to me when I see free trial and credit card gifs, am I wrong on this?

I agree that this is a fantastically great idea. But, yeah, it seems that this might simply be a re-selling of a collection of sounds. Perhaps the product is the 'engine' that drives what plays when. In which case, one could say that the engine is the work for sale.

No matter to me in any case, I FULLY support this creative endeavour! Good show!

NoiseCollector
Where are we on commercial use as this is basically triggering cc licensed sounds randomly, not a compostion but a commercial reproduction. Just curious. Looks problematic to me when I see free trial and credit card gifs, am I wrong on this?

Yeah, I agree it's problematic... and I couldnt help noticing the advertising post starts with a Freudian mistake, 'Deal all'

this is definitely a not-so-clear-cut case...

noakes9, could you please contact creative commons as soon as possible and see if this is really a legitimate use of creative commons samples. Your program looks great, it's not that, but I'm quite sure you can't include any freesound samples with your program (and not too sure if making presets that automatically grab samples from here would be legal either).

Of course it's legal to sell the program and then have people download sounds from freesound, but...

Perhaps supply the presets as a free adon to the program which -freely- downloads the right samples. That way you sell the program, but give away the presets and the samples for free. Also, it would be particularly nice if the program could display the original art while loading a preset (I saw you include the attribution per sample in the properties of the sample or something like it) but it's always nice to see some more prominent display of the original authors.

- bram, freesound

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your supportive comments. I have contacted Creative Commons and will post their response for the benefit of others.

To summarise:

The basic Backsounds application is free (the registered version doesn't have a time limitation..), and I do not ship any sound files with the application.

The sound files that I have made freely available for download from http://backsounds.co.uk, have been modified/resampled/spliced and filtered. This was necessary for the concept to work - I considered reposting the files here, but didn't think it would add anything to the freesound project.

I have correctly attributed each sound file back to the original author, and as I have "mashed-up" the original samples, believe that I am in compliance with the terms of the license:

You are free
"To sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform this work for commercial or noncommercial purposes."

Under the following conditions
"You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). "

I would understand if the sounds were made available under the NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0 licence.

Perhaps I have missed something?

Thanks again, and keep up the good work!

Paul

BTW, Natural Worlds is a software that does the same thing for those of us that use OS X. Also, it's free (as in beer).

Natural Worlds can be found here - http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32096

This is great, i never though procedural sound generation could come to this. Anyone knows what kind of algorithms they use to produce nature sounds ?

Where can i read more about it ?