2009 Summer School in Sound and Music Computing & SID Training School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds

Posted on January 16, 2009 by admin

Hello everyone,

I thought you might be interested in coming to this summer school!

Best regards,

emilia

We are pleased to announce the 2009 Summer School in Sound and Music Computing & SID Training School on Interactions with Environmental Sounds.

It will take place in Casa Da M?sica, Porto, Portugal, July 18th-21st, 2009, just before the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference.

The theme of this summer school is Interacting with Sounds of Porto. This summer school will explore the potential of recording, processing, sharing and interacting with city sounds.

During 4 days, the program will include lectures, as well as hands-on practical sessions under the supervision of tutors who will provide one-to-one mentoring on artistic and/or scientific projects focused on interactions with sounds that reflect the city of Porto and its activities. Speed talks and poster sessions will also be organized for students to present and receive feedback on their current research, and to foster scientific cross-fertilization.

Lectures and teachers

  1. Design of new interfaces for musical expression . Marcelo Wanderley.
  2. Registering the soundscape. Joel Chadabe.
  3. Sound edition, description and retrieval, social networks. Xavier Serra.

Tutors and proposed topics

  1. Jean-Julien Aucouturier (Topic: Hearing objects)
  2. Stephan Baumann (Topic: UrbanSync: back in Porto)
  3. Eoin Brazil (Topic 1: Porto sound shaker. Topic 2: Porto Mobile Sound Wall. Topic 3: Porto fact-oid mutlimedia kiosk)
  4. Bram de Jong (Topic: Porto in Freesound)
  5. Luis Gustavo Martins (Topic: Automatic segmentation, classification and clustering of sounds of Porto for tangible interaction)
  6. Rui Penha (Topic: Interfaces and algorithms for Casa da M?sica robotic Gamelan)
  7. Stefania Serafin and Federico Fontana (Topic: Natural interactive walking in Porto)

Dates

April 24th / Deadline for application (see details on the web)

May 12th / Notification of acceptance

There will be a registration fee of 200? to the Summer School. The COST Action IC0601 on Sonic Interaction Design will provide financial help to a selection of students under the form of individual fixed grants of 500 Euros (preference will be given to students whose proposal projects best fit SID topics -see here).

Summer School students are also encouraged to attend the Sound and Music Computing Conference (23-25th July 2009). There will be special (lower) conference fees for Summer School students.

More info at http://www.smcnetwork.org/summerschool/porto2009

Stay tuned on the summer school and conference news:


							

	
			

									
						Posted in talks, workshops					
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From subversion to git.


			

				Posted on January 16, 2009 by bdejong			


					

				
Following the overall exodus where people change from using subversion to git, we -much like lemmings- could not stay far behind.


All source code for freesound “2.0” a.k.a. nightingale can now be found over at github:


http://github.com/bram/freesound/tree/master/


Update your links!

							

	
			

									
						Posted in Nightingale, Tech Talk					
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Meet Chiapas, the new database server.


			

				Posted on December 12, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
Meet chiapas:


HP Proliant DL360 G5

Processor: Xeon Quad Core E5440

Memory: 14 GB RAM

Dual ethernet

Dual power supply

Redundant ventilation system

Hard drives: 3 x 15000RPM, 72GB, SAS

Price: 4.797,42?


Chiapas is now happily running the Freesound.org database. It wouldn’t have been possbile to start using this machine without the help of Letusa ( http://www.letusa.es ). They kindly sponsored the aquisition of this machine and of another, even pricier one I will introduce once we start using it.


The previous server was completely out of breath when we installed this machine. This one is keeping up just fine:


http://iua-share.upf.es/ganglia/?c=Freesound.org&h=chiapas.upf.es


As you can see for yourself, Freesound.org has become snappy again and quickly responds to all your requests. Hurray for big, bad server machines! Oh and here’s one for people with hardware fetishes:


Chiapas


Chiapas on the left, Mystery Machine on the right.

							

	
			

									
						Posted in hardware, Tech Talk					
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The final front page design…


			

				Posted on October 29, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
Hello everyone,


Thanks for all the feedback that you all gave when we posted the various freesound designs. We’ve used this feedback and worked on a new design, which is -in our opinion- offers a much better design which works well with freesound. Have a look:




Comments? Post them in the forum…

							

	
			

									
						Posted in design, Nightingale					
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Slow, slower, slowest…


			

				Posted on October 17, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
Hello all,


We know, freesound has been getting slower these days. But, help is along the way. Next week we will start initial testing of our brand new shining database server ( more about that later!). For those who like little graphics to spice up their daily lives, how about these. They represent the “server load” (how much the server is suffering) in the last year:


Our web server, doing relatively well:

http://iua-share.upf.edu/ganglia/?r=year&c=IUA&h=iua-freesound.upf.es


Our poor database server, slowly but very surely drowning:

http://iua-share.upf.edu/ganglia/?r=year&c=IUA&h=freesound-db.upf.es 


You don’t need to be a genius to tell that that line is going up too fast for our own good. There’s just too many of you who want to use Freesound! Of course all of these problems will be solved with Freesound 2 a.k.a. Nightingale, but… we’re still heavy at work there. For now, switching to a new, shiny, 4 core, 14GB RAM machine will probably help. Again, more about those later! 😉


Your host for tonight,


– Bram

							

	
			

									
						Posted in hardware, Tech Talk					
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Nightingale possible design


			

				Posted on September 16, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
Go over to http://www.freesound.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3542 and help us decide which logo to choose, and comment on a possible new design!

							

	
			

									
						Posted in design, Nightingale					
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Introducing Freesound Radio


			

				Posted on September 1, 2008 by groma			


					

				
Hi there. Freesound radio has now been installed on freesound:


http://www.freesound.org/radio/?


The?Freesound Radio is an experimental web-based system I’ve been working on ?at the MTG ?to experiment around collaboration and social interaction in sample based music creations, using freesound as the source of sounds.??The Sample Patch Editor interface allows you to put together short creations (sample patches) using samples?from the freesound?database.


?


??freesound radio editor?


?


?The?Player interface offers a meeting place to listen and interact with the existing creations of the users. By voting patches and bookmarking your favorite sounds and tags you collectively influence an evolutionary algorithm that continuously creates new patches by remixing and mutating existing ones.??


?


freesound radio player????


?


Both prototypes are now online and waiting for your contributions. ?Enjoy!?

							

	
			

									
						Posted in freesound radio					
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Dobroide and Reinsamb(r)a at National Geographic


			

				Posted on August 29, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
Freesounder and pro sound designer Ron Sunsinger wrote me yesterday. He has used sounds from Dobroide and Reinsamba on the national geographic episode Man Made – Hi Tech Museum. And -like the license requires- both are credited. The episode aired in August and may air again soon! So keep an eye on the N. G. tv!


Row writes: “Here is a shot from my digital camera of my screen for the credit. Its a nice one, freesound has the first credit when the film is over [snip]. You can look on Nat Geo TV network site under Man Made for credits, but they take a while to get them up on the website.”


national geographic


Pity they got Reinsamba’s name wrong, but I’m sure he won’t mind 🙂


Special thanks to Ron for sending this in!

							

	
			

									
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Freesound teams up with Happy New Ears


			

				Posted on August 4, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
A while ago Laura from Happy New Ears/Sonokids contacted me to see if we were interested in working together with them. Happy New Ears is a “new music” (lot’s of experimental things going on) festival in Kortrijk/Belgium.


She has proposed us to have the community of Freesound create sounds to load into the Omni (link in dutch, but with pictures) installation for kids and grownups all alike. It looks like a giant mushroom with buttons on top you can hit. If you hit a button a sound is played (see below for images). Of course we were immediately interested, and we hope the community likes the idea as well. Freesounds in a giant, colorful mushroom, being hit by kids? Talk about a psychedelic experience.


We’ve received some tech specs from the creators who have told us that sounds need to be shorter than 3 seconds, and need to be wav, 16bit, stereo. As you can see in the pictures the Omni has 108 pads, separated in 4 pizza slices of 27 sounds. I propose that anyone who wants to create sounds for the Omni creates 27 sounds, named 1 to 27, tagged with “sonokids-omni”, uploaded and added to one sound pack (so I can easily download them). Start counting at the top of the Omni-slice and go down in regular writing sense (i.e. 1, then 2,3, then 4,5,6,7, …). Deadline: 12th of September.


We will ask the people who built the Omni to cycle through the various packs during the 3 days the Omni will be accessible: September 19th, 20th and 21st.












( Photos ? Deen van Meer )


If you are from Belgium (or from around here), and provide some sounds, we will try to get you in for free. I’ll point Laura to this post and let’s see if she agrees to that. 🙂 Also, all sounds will be attributed on the day they are used. I.e. there will be a paper saying who made the sounds of the day!

							

	
			

									
						Posted in workshops					
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Prix Ars Electronica and Sons de Barcelona


			

				Posted on June 24, 2008 by bdejong			


					

				
We had known for a while, but were sworn to secrecy (queue spy music). Now that it’s out we can say it as well: we got an honorary mention at the very prestigious Prix Ars Electronica 2008! Our friends over at reactable (another UPF / MTG project) got the Golden Nica, the highest honor at ars electronica, for which we congratulate them and will give them a big hug next week!!!


Meanwhile we’ve started Sons de Barcelona, a local sound project concerning freesound, sounds in general and Barcelona. The focus of this project will be field-recordings in Barcelona, coupled with workshops for younger kids. If you read Catalan and/or are located in Catalunya, you should really have a look!

							

	
			

									
						Posted in honors, sons-de-barcelona, workshops					
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