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.

The IMP noise jam took place this past Saturday. There were two events, the first happened some time in the afternoon Eastern Standard, and the other around 10pm EST.

I attended the second event, fun was had. All told there was roughly a dozen in attendance over the course of the 2-3 hour window.

We use the free Ninjam by Cockos for the networking. All things considered, it’s a pretty good solution for near real-time network jamming, but it is fraught with some technical complications. On my system at least, it was complicated using software as my sound source, since I had to route it out of one sound card (the crappy one on the motherboard, and back into the better card (which doesn’t allow ASIO sharing, which is why I had to use the two cards). Admittedly, it’s all noise, so bad sound didn’t really matter, but nonetheless it’s not my preferred method, especially since I seem to have maxed out the output on the cheap soundcard with a little too much noise (not sure what happened there, never used the crap thing before). I also seemed to have killed my Internet connection when I used a crashy plugin. That happened around midnight, and for some unknown reason, I was not able to reconnect to the Internet until the next morning. I’ll be improving my technical situation for the next round.

In terms of the results, I haven’t listened back to them yet, but it struck me that while occasionally several players worked well together, hitting a good stride, it mostly was chaos. Especially since at least one of the participants seemed to be transmitting ten times louder than everybody else (maybe that’s a function of the master mixer, I don’t know). But as a healthy dose of chaos, it was a good time making a lot of noise all together.

The funniest parts happened when someone joined in (since the Ninjam servers are public) and didn’t quite know what the hell was actually going on. Here and there, should you choose to listen to the results, you might hear someone break out into a metal guitar riff trying to join in, but mostly being confounded by the chaos.

Highly encourage everyone to consider joining in next month, at least to vent some aggression for 10 minutes and then cut out after that.

Read more about the NFFA here, and check out the mp3 podcast files from that page (contains this month’s and last month’s). I’m guessing the results are edited/mixed by John Ingram post-event to get them down to a reasonable size.

[Update] Started listening to the podcast, not as chaotic messy (all things of course being relative) so far as I’d expected. I quickly jumped through the whole thing just to get an idea of what was there and whether I recognized any of it. Some interesting things, but holy mother, it’s 3 hours long, so approach with caution and plenty of fluids.

[Update #2] For the most excellent guitar riff intervention, start listening at around 115 minutes and stay with it for five minutes or so. I was the primary noisemaker through that stretch, the result should be good for a laugh (made me laugh anyway).