freesound.org

This Friday (16th of April) Bram de Jong will do a presentation on Freesound.org at Dorkbot Gent.

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to

• browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more
• up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
• interact with fellow sound-artists!

We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.

public secrets

From 9 till 14 February we organise the Artefact festival for art & media at STUK in Leuven. One of the works presented in the exhibtion is the confronting Public Secrets of Sharon Daniel. This website provides an interactive interface to an audio archive of hundreds of statements made by current and former prisoners, which reveal the many secret injustices perpetrated by the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Visitors navigate a multi-vocal narrative that links individual testimony, public evidence and social theory, in order to challenge the assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to social problems.

There are secrets that are kept from the public and there are ‘public secrets,’ — secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself. The trick to the public secret is knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge.

In the United States the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are ‘public secrets’. The public perception of justice relies on not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.

Your dog was on this too?

Carl Weismann was a Danish legendary pioneer bird voice recording engineer, working for the Danish State Radio in Copenhagen. Weismann’s recordings were repeatedly ruined by dogs all around in Denmark and he used to have two categories of tapes: with and without dogs. One day he cut together a tape of various toned dog barks set to the music of ‘Jingle Bells’. He had no further intentions, than it might be fun for a Danish children radio show. But it ended up in 1955 in the American charts as the disc was released by RCA in USA and sold there instantly 500.000 copies. There was also a release in Britain around the same time was on the Pye-Nixa label, on the old 78 rpm format. 
In Sweden it has been seen on the Metronome label. Howard Smith, host of a four-hour show with sometimes also weird or new stuff, first started playing the original 45 rpm disc again at Christmas 1970. Smith played the disc for many weeks prior to Christmas 1971 and told some RCA executives at a record party about the public response to his playing their old record. RCA unearthed the original parts at their plant in Indianapolis and rushed the disc into release in early December 1971. In 3 weeks alone it sold again 420,000 copies, the combined sales through the years thus making it a million seller. Many of Smith’s callers stated that their own dogs sang along with the record.

Here’s the original: (later there were many copycats around these dogs, be aware : ) )

And here what the man was really doing. An excerpt from 1952, without dogs.