Saturday, June 15, 2024

Some More Maps of Sounds

Yesterday Hacker News featured a thread on Sounds of the Forest, an interactive map of sound recordings made in forests around the world. Also linked in the Hacker News thread was the wonderful Radio Aporee, which, like Sounds of the Forest, has featured on Maps Mania before. Also mentioned in the thread were two interactive sound maps which I haven't seen (or heard) before.

Audiomapa

map of the world showing the locations of sound recordings featured on audiomapa
Audiomapa is a sound map which focuses on sound recordings from South America (although many users have contributed recordings from elsewhere in the world). Anyone can add a sound recording to the map simply by clicking on a location and uploading an MP3 file.

As well as browsing the submitted recordings by location on the map it is also possible to filter the sounds by category. This allows you to search for 'urban' or 'rural' recordings, or recordings of 'birds', 'machines', 'markets' or myriad other categories of sound. Just click on a marker on the map to listen to the submitted recording.

Freesound

map of the world showing sound recordings submitted to Freesound
Freesound, from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, is an interactive map of over half a million sound recordings. The map "aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse". 

As well as browsing the submitted sounds by location on the interactive map the Freesound homepage features a Random Sound of the Day, the latest sounds submitted, and the top rated and most downloaded sounds recordings. Using Freesound's tags and other search filters in conjunction with the interactive map can provide a wonderful insight into sounds around the world. For example have you ever wondered about how ambulance sirens sound in different countries or how similar church bells sound around the world.


Hundreds of other maps featuring sound recordings can be found under the Maps Mania Sound Maps tag.

1 comment:

Rodolfo said...

Sounds of Caracas, Venezuela
https://caracassoundscape.web.app/