Creative Commons: Revisiting the Openverse: Finding Open Images and Audio. “Finding and using free and open works has never been easier: Just visit Openverse, enter some keywords, and pick your favorite from the results. You can also filter by content type, sources, aspect ratio, size, open license and public domain statuses, and more.”
Scientific American: Audio Astronomy Unlocks a Universe of Sound. “To realize their dreams, [Sarah] Kane and other budding blind or visually impaired (BVI) researchers are betting big on efforts to turn scientific data into sound, also called sonification. At a conference at the Lorentz Center in the Netherlands last December, a motley crew of scientists, sound engineers and educators representing the leaders of the nascent field of astronomical sonification gathered to discuss current projects and chart a course forward.”
Ars Technica: Make your noisy recording sound like pro audio with Adobe’s free AI tool. “Recently, Adobe released a free AI-powered audio processing tool that can enhance some poor-quality voice recordings by removing background noise and making the voice sound stronger. When it works, the result sounds like a recording made in a professional sound booth with a high-quality microphone.”
MusicRadar: Riffusion is a free web app that uses AI to create music from your text prompts. “Riffusion works by generating images from spectograms, which are then converted into audio clips. We’re told that it can generate infinite variations of a text prompt by varying the ‘seed’.” This isn’t as polished as an image generator, but it’s interesting. I found that the longer I let the audio run, the better it sounded.
TechCrunch: AI music generators could be a boon for artists — but also problematic. “Harmonai is an organization with financial backing from Stability AI, the London-based startup behind Stable Diffusion. In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.”
How-To Geek: Wikipedia Wants a Sound Logo, and it Needs Your Help. “Wikipedia is a resource many of us go to when we need information, and its globe puzzle logo is almost universally recognized. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a sound that can be associated with it and be just as recognizable.”
How-To Geek: Winamp 5.9 Is the First Stable Update in Four Years. “Winamp was a popular media player application in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it has received infrequent updates in recent years to address compatibility issues. Winamp 5.9 has now been released, marking the first major update since 2018.”
Clark University: Listening to the Whispering World of ASMR with Professors Shuo Niu and Hugh Manon. “Some people feel an unusual tingle in their brain after watching someone whisper in a YouTube video. On this episode of Challenge. Change., Hugh Manon, professor of screen studies and chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, and Shuo Niu, professor of computer science, dig into the social media phenomenon that is ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response.” No transcript available, but a brief article accompanies the podcast.
NewsWise: Direct sound printing is a potential game-changer in 3D printing, according to Concordia researchers. “Most 3D printing methods currently in use rely either on photo (light)- or thermo (heat)-activated reactions to achieve precise manipulation of polymers. The development of a new platform technology called direct sound printing (DSP), which uses soundwaves to produce new objects, may offer a third option.”
NASA: What Sounds Captured by NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reveal About Mars. “The result of the recordings: a new understanding of strange characteristics of the Martian atmosphere, where the speed of sound is slower than on Earth – and varies with pitch (or frequency). On Earth, sounds typically travel at 767 mph (343 meters per second). But on Mars, low-pitched sounds travel at about 537 mph (240 meters per second), while higher-pitched sounds move at 559 mph (250 meters per second).”
Boing Boing: This website turns text into music. “Typatone assigns musical tones to letters. Start typing (or paste in any text) to hear original music.” I tried it. The music I made reminded me of some of those trippy Sesame Street animations from the early 70s.
BBC: First at-risk Isle of Man sound recordings available online . “The first 100 archive recordings from the Manx Museum archives have been made available online for the first time. It is part of the British Library’s £9.3m Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project to digitise historic and culturally significant sound files. Some of the recordings date back as far as the early 1900s.” An additional 500 recordings will come online over the next year.
Christian Science Monitor: Blue whales: An acoustic library helps us find what we can’t see. “Reverberating through the ice shelves and gyres of the Southern Ocean are the undersongs of the largest animal that has ever lived on this planet, the Antarctic blue whale. Telling tales of the hunt for krill, of navigation and seduction, these tunes can carry for hundreds of miles. And the world is listening: Moored around Antarctica is a loose ring of passive acoustic monitoring devices, or PAMs, deployed by various academic institutions. Released by oceanographic research vessels, the devices sink to the seafloor where they record a remote and often hostile realm that is practically out of reach of scientists.”
Papua New Guinea Post-Courier: Research into ancestral sounds. “Researchers are now putting greater emphasis on studying the ancestral sounds from Papua New Guinea, says Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. ‘What if you could hear sounds made in your area over a hundred years ago? Would you recognise the songs or would they be unfamiliar? Are they anything like the songs sung today? Could you understand the words of a story told in your language or would there be too many old words that are hard to understand? Is this story still told today?’ Prof Niles said.”
MakeUseOf: How to Set Up and Use Alexa Routines Triggered by Sounds. “Alexa is always listening for the wake word (which, by default, is ‘Alexa’). However, Amazon’s digital voice assistant can pick up much more than just your voice commands. Thanks to a feature called Sound Detection, currently available as a public preview, your Amazon Echo can listen out for several other sounds, too, then launch a series of commands in response.”
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