Development [LWN.net]

The OLPC project releases 10GB of sound samples

By Forrest Cook
July 2, 2008

The One Laptop Per Child project recently released a large collection of sound samples:

Loops, Grooves, Licks, Stings, Hits, Pads, Melodic Motives/Themes/Phrases, Sound-Effects, City and Country Soundscapes, Motors, Machines, Toys, Guns, Explosions, Swords, Armor, Cars, Jets, Pot & Pans, Acoustic and Synthetic Noises, Acoustic and Electronic Drums, Voices, Western and World Instruments, Real and Human Animals, Industrial and Natural Ambiences, Film and Game Foley, and more, more, more! This huge collection of new and original samples have been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger @ cSounds.com specifically to support the OLPC developers, students, XO users, and computer and electronic musicians everywhere. They are FREE and are offered under a CC-BY license for downloading and use in your teaching, your demos, your research, your music, your remixes, your songs, your games, your videos, your slideshows, your websites, and your XO activities.

The sample collection comes from a number of sources including the Open Path Music recording label, Zenph Studios (a musical software company), the Berklee College of Music, the Berklee Music Synthesis Alumni, Berklee Shares.com, the Worldwide Community of Csound Developers, Teachers and Users and Dr. Richard Boulanger.

The sample collection is somewhat random in nature, there are similarities in the material from the various sources such as many single notes from common musical instruments. The recording quality tends to be decent, although a percentage of the sound samples have audible hum, hiss, aliasing issues and rough beginnings or endings. All of the samples are recorded in mono and are available in several sample rates. The samples have also had their volumes normalized. An obvious improvement to the collection would involve compressing the samples with FLAC to save disk space. The majority of the samples have durations of a few seconds or less, there are a number of long selections from long ambient recordings or groupings of short sounds.

The sound descriptions for the various collections are somewhat generic, the best way to get a good understanding of the entire library is to download a group of sub-collections and play through the various sounds. Having a few gigabytes of empty disk space is a good idea. Unleashing a random audio file player on the collection can be amusing, if somewhat annoying after a while. Your editor listened to a random selection from the first seven sections from the Berklee College of Music Sampling Archive, the collection is quite diverse.

One can imagine a number of possible uses for such a large library of sounds. Adding audio to games is an obvious use for the sounds. One could create accessibility applications for the visually impaired. In keeping with the OLPC theme, a teacher could sort through the sounds and use them for educating children about animals, musical instruments and other things that they may not experience in daily life. On the artistic side, the samples could be put to good use making audio tracks and movies. With the appropriate sample playing software, new and interesting musical instruments could be created.

If your software project has a need for some open-licensed audio clips, the OLPC collection is a good source. Producing a large collection of sounds such as this would involve many hours of work.

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