Amazing sounds

Something about the dreariness of the day has led us to explore some sonic goodness out there on the internets.

First up is the Music: Digital Archive of Appalachia, which we found on the Blue Ridge Blog, who found it someplace else. There’s some great music stored here if you like the real bluegrass, the real folk, the real country.

If you’re just interested in hearing some neat stuff, check out the sound archive at free in society. You can hear a JFK speech or some cool animal sounds.

Finally, if you’re into warping sound to do your bidding, try out the Thornsetter Project. It’s a year-long experiement by Ashvegas blogger syntax. Go there and you’ll hear amazing sounds. And he’ll tell you how he got them. For example:

This is another one of those “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you” things – a five-second snippet of dialogue from a TV movie, pitch-shifted several semitones downward, warped all the way down to 20 b.p.m., mangled using the “Stutterer” Pluggo plug-in and rendered all using Ableton Live.

Here’s what the Thornsetter Project is all about:

The Thornsetter Project is a year-long sound art project.

At least three times a week, a random sound file will be uploaded to this website in a high-quality (320kbps 44.1kHz – “alt-preset insane”) MP3 format. All of these sounds will be licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling license. Anyone will be free to use these sounds in their own works. These sounds will be varied and random – some coming from my sound archives, others freshly recorded.

At the end of each month, a composition will be created using that month’s uploaded sound files as source material. The end result will be a finished, 12-track album to be released at the beginning of 2008.