Along with the blog relocation, I’ve moved the Sounds Found Project to the sighup.ca server:

http://soundsfound.sighup.ca

I’ve ported most content to its new home–the two recordings from Austin, Texas being the exception, primarily because they are big files and I was tired of waiting on the ftp upload to finish. I will put them back soon.

Now that it has a new home, I’m going to endeavour to revise the site. It needs to be moved to a database format as the list grows, and I’m considering adding some kind of efficient user submission system. Since the original project was really just meant to be stuff that I recorded and shared with the world, I hadn’t really ever given any proper attention to expanding it to other contributors. The other contributors on the project are friends and have all joined through me directly. But that might change. I’m investigating what software will suit my needs, so it will progress in the next few months. I’ve also just ordered a Zoom H2, making recording while out and about both easier and less conspicuous for me. Expect new Toronto content soon.

The project still also resides at its original home at Intelligent Machinery. I’m not sure what we’ll do yet with it. It might disappear, it might remain as a mirror, it might become a second and independent cell of the project. Too early to know which way it’ll play out.

For the past month, I’ve had stats tracking in place on www.sighup.ca for the first time in its six-year history. Some fascinating things (to me, and since few people read this blog now that we’ve moved to this new CMS, I’ll indulge) can be found in the stats. On the happy side, 58 SIGHUP tracks have been listened to a total of 666 times in the past 30 days. The site, on average receives upward of 700 unique visitors in a month, much higher than I anticipated in my pre-stats days.

Which brings us to the more ridiculous side: this is my most successful track.

It has been listened to 204 times in the past month. What some readers may not know is that I am the author of the “Drones for Beginners” tutorial in KVR’s WIKI. In the past year-and-a-half, that tutorial has been viewed a total 26,648 times, which equates to close to 1500 times a month. It would seem that roughly 14% of all viewers of the page listen to the final track. All things considered, that strikes me as fairly impressive for an anonymous track floating about the great Interweb ocean. Ultimately, I’m not sure what any of the listeners think of the track, they may all think it sucks, which would be a kind of success unto itself. I, on rare occasion, receive feedback about the tutorial, usually in the form of a question (i.e. where can a get a phase vocoder). Had I known it would be so well-listened to, I likely would have spent more than a half hour on it. Its origins are documented here and here.

If it were up to me, I’d hope for Edison Moon to be my most listened to music, but what can you do. Of course, I am now concocting ways in which I can write a tutorial based entirely around the creation of Edison Moon to shower the unsuspecting masses with its glory, perhaps “Sonic Archaeology for Beginners” {insert devious gesture here}.

So there you have one more piece of trivia to save for a rainy day. I’ve not benefited in any material sense from the volume of interest in the tutorial, as no one has presented me with any form of opportunity based on their familiarity with my work (wink wink, I’m always open to opportunity e.g. hey, Steve, we love what you’ve done here, have some free gear on us). But no matter, a desire for recognition is of course not why I do such things, even if I don’t always know why I do them. I’m hoping at least it hasn’t hindered my karma in any way. Judging from my recent neighbour woe on the home front, I suspect it hasn’t really improved my karma in the short-term, but perhaps eternal sunshine for me in the lives to come.

As I have been busy the past few days adding content to the sounds found project, I’ve become increasingly sensitive to the sounds around me. One of the things that recording often forces you to do is to stop and sit for a few minutes while you get some of the sounds down, so I’ve been spending the time listening carefully to what sounds get captured. Or in any given situation, I’ve become very aware of what sounds around me might get me to hit record. Highly worthwhile activity.

As for the project itself, there are now 20+ recordings free for the taking, in my esteem a good number to lend the whole thing a bit of momentum.

I’ve started a new thing here at Intelligent Machinery called the sounds found project.

The basic idea is that I’ll be dropping miscellaneous field recordings I’ve captured with my trusty iRiver and Sony microphone into the public domain. I’ve been looking here and there on the web for audio sources for music projects, too often everything comes with the requirement for attribution. For instance, I’ve always liked the idea of the Freesound project, but it has become dominated by the idea that everyone deserves and expects credit, and that’s just not where my interests lie. So I’ve decided to put up instead of just griping about it, and all of these recordings come with absolutely zero strings attached. Sell them if you want, call them your own, it doesn’t matter to me.

I don’t have anything against acknowledging the efforts of others, but it can be a challenge to keep track of where audio originated, and frankly I think it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if people didn’t require credit for everything they do. Just do something for the joy of it and share once in a while, it’ll do you a world of good.

The recordings themselves are fairly rough, basically just me hitting record in a given place and letting it run for a few minutes. They are filled with buzzes and hums and bumps and pops and clicks. My hope is that they’ll be useful source material for some, and simply enjoyed as glimpses of places by others.

I’ve put five recordings up so far–two from yesterday, three from today–and I’ll be adding more on a regular, if not exactly daily, basis.

I’d like to eventually set it up so that others can add to the repository, but I’m sure that would require some kind of legal prep work to ensure everything goes effectively to the public domain. So for now it’ll just hold stuff that I’ve recorded.

So the March edition of the monthly noise-free-for-all took place Saturday evening. The event was quite a bit of fun, lasted a little over two and a half hours and featured a good ten or twelve participants. And it was pretty noisy.

Unfortunately, through some kind of a technical error, the whole event wasn’t all recorded for the downloadable mp3 as it has been in previous months. Our man Mystahr, however, was able to record a good portion of the event (roughly the last 90 minutes) and has mixed it down and chopped it up into an album of 10-minute chunks of easily digestible scree.

Fun way to listen back to it, as it omits the occasional lull and false starts in between momentum shifts that happen in such events. Click here to get the collection. Mind some of the audio stoppages on tracks 3&4, though, I think Mark was having some on again/off again troubles with bandwidth for a while. There were so many of us on-line, we may have taxed Ninjam more than it could bear.