The Freesound Project

 

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!

They are looking for institutions and schools who want to help them with this effort. Could our institution help  fill the database? Are there any students who can help by doing (field-)recordings as assignments? Recordings of instruments? Do you have a large batch of usable sounds? Anything goes as long as the sounds can be released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

April 28, 2010 sound editing for visual media, Uncategorized 2 Comments on The Freesound Project

Ricky Leacock, Prokofiev and a Tea Strainer

An out-take from the rushes of a documentary currently in production here at University of Lincoln, called ‘A Boatload of Wild Irishmen‘. Due to be screened at Galway Film Festival 2010. (Editor Chris Hainstock, Written by Prof Brian Winston, of our faculty)

© Mac Dara OCurradhin/Minerva Productions/University of Lincoln


Here Cinematographer Ricky Leacock (interviewed at Lincoln University) recalls a tale of when he went to film a performance of an unfinished work by Prokofiev. In 1937 the Russian authorities had banned Prokofiev from working on the project at the time. Prokofiev died in 1953.
Much later in the 1980’s Ricky used a rather unorthodox technique to get the best sound he could using early Digital Camcorders, to make a film of a new performance of this unfinished work in Siberia, alongside Conductor Sarah Cornwell (who found the manuscript in Prokofievs handwriting) and Victoria Leacock’s daughter.
Ricky had spent his life working on film 16 and 35mm. In his early career, sound was recorded on acetate discs, and sent back to the labs, where it was transferred to film.
See this clip \Sound took weeks to come back\

He witnessed over the years the changing face of sync sound recording. He went on to teach at MIT in New York.

April 22, 2010 sound history, Uncategorized No Comments on Ricky Leacock, Prokofiev and a Tea Strainer

Dickson Experimental Sound Film – first known sync sound recording

Audio for Visual Media, it all began in 1894

The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is a film made by William Dickson in late 1894 or early 1895. It is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first example of a motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison.
(The Kinetophone—consisting of a Kinetoscope accompanied by a cylinder-playing phonograph—was not a true sound-film system as no attempt was made to synchronize image and audio throughout playback.) The film was produced at the “Black Maria,” Edison’s New Jersey film studio. There is no evidence that it was ever exhibited in its original format. Newly digitized and restored, it is the only surviving Kinetophone film.
In 2002 the discovery was made – The Library of Congress has discovered the missing sound-track for this film, which was at the Edison National Historical Site all along. It was a cylinder, broken in half, labelled “WKL Dickson Violin with Kineto” and it has recently been repaired, transcribed, and put in synch with the image. This short film now takes its place as the oldest existing sound film. Before the image starts, you can just hear someone saying “Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!”

Walter Murch, a legendary and Oscar-winning sound designer and film editor, was personally involved in reuniting the film with its cylinder phonograph soundtrack for the first time since the 19th century.

April 21, 2010 sound history No Comments on Dickson Experimental Sound Film – first known sync sound recording