Earlier this year, we launched the Freesound 20th Anniversary Composition contest to celebrate two decades of Freesound. Now, we are thrilled to announce the results!
The contest invited sound artists, composers, and explorers from around the world to create works around the theme of Intangible Heritage, using only sounds from the Freesound archive.
We are very grateful for the enthusiastic response from the community: in total, we received 42 submissions. After a first pre-selection round carried out by members of the Freesound team in which 14 works were shortlisted, our invited jury awarded 1 First Prize, 2 Second Prizes, and 2 Honorary Mentions.
The jury was composed of:
Awarded works
1st Prize
- Pantea “Echoes in the Fold”
2nd Prizes
- Sean Kinnear “Our Attempts (Leaves)”
- Timothy Schmele “1972”
Honorary Mentions
- Stefano Calvanese “MEMORIA CONDIVISA (Collective Memory)”
- Diego Martinez “Sucesos irrecordables (Pouvoir tout dire)¨
Anniversary event
To mark this special occasion, we will host a 20th Anniversary Celebration on October 28th, 2025 at Sala Aranyó, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. The event will feature a public audition of the shortlisted and winning compositions, alongside talks from users of the Freesound community. The talks will be streamed to enable online participation. This will be a unique opportunity to get to know the Freesound’s community better, to hear directly from contributors, and to come together to celebrate two decades of shared sounds. We warmly invite everyone to join us in Barcelona (or remote) for this celebration! The full program of the event will be made available during the coming weeks in the Freesound blog.
Once again, we would like to thank all the participants for their contributions. The diversity of the submissions truly showcased the creative potential of Freesound’s contributors. We are working towards making all the submissions available online in the coming months. Stay tuned for more news to come!
– Błażej Kotowski on behalf of the Freesound Team