Hi everyone!
The Freesound 20th Anniversary Composition Contest was launched on February 2025, by Fundació Phonos and the Freesound team. For the record, terms for participation are available here. 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.
Intangible Heritage includes the intangible and ephemeral elements that shape our world – whether rooted in human culture, natural environments, or the entangled interplay between them. These sounds reflect what is fragile, ever-changing, and at risk of disappearing. Freesound, with its extensive archive, provides a digital space where these sounds can be preserved and reimagined.
A total of 42 works were submitted to the contest, with the winners being announced in the Freesound blog. A live event took place during the Freesound Day on October 28th, 2025, in which a listening session of a selection of contest submissions was carried out. The present collection features the contest submissions created by various artists who gave us permission to share their works online. This includes a total of 26 pieces. If you submitted a piece to the contest and you want it to be part of the release, please let us know and we’ll add it 🙂 Information about every individual composition is available when provided by the authors, together with a list of Freesound sounds used for the composition.
You can listen to the submissions here 🙂
Once again, we would like to thank all the participants for their contributions. It was a great experience to organise such a contest!
– Frederic on behalf of the Freesound Team