Living Worlds Sounds
One of the most frequent requests for the Living Worlds app is ambient sounds… Rain, water rushing, wind in the leaves, etc. The web demo Joseph Huckaby made had ambient sound loops, and people would like them brought into the app. I like this idea as well, but I’m not satisfied with the loops from the demo… They’re fairly short (i.e. repetitive) and not terribly high-quality (no offense to Joseph… he agrees!). They’re good enough for a web demo, but not what you’d hope for from a dedicated app. Also, of course, they don’t cover all of the range of things that happen in the full app scenes.
What I’d really like is for the sounds to have the same sort of dynamic life that the images have… This means multiple overlapping loops, along with periodic sounds the come in from time to time, all responsive to the state of the visual world (weather, time of day, etc.). I’ve been working on some tech to do just that, and it seems to be working well. There’s just one thing missing: the actual sounds!
This is where you come in… I’d like to enlist the Living Worlds fan base in hunting down suitable sounds! There are an amazing number of sounds freely available at places like freesound.org. Probably everything we need is already there, but we need to find it! I’m up for editing and mixing the sounds as needed, but actually discovering the sounds in the first place has proven to be a bit overwhelming. Perhaps it takes a village to do this right…
I’m not sure exactly how this process will go, but I figure we should charge in and see what comes together! We need someplace to collaborate, so I’ve created a space on GitHub, since I know it well, and it’s free for anyone to make an account. I’m open to other collaboration ideas, so hit me up if you’ve got them, but meanwhile, here it is:
https://github.com/pixfabrik/living-worlds-sounds
If you’re interested in being part of The Great Living Worlds Sound Hunt, please join me there. Let’s make some noise!
