This year, Freesound celebrates its 20th anniversary, and Intangible Heritage has been chosen as the main theme of the celebration. Intangible heritage encompasses the ephemeral and immaterial elements that shape our world, whether rooted in human culture, natural environments, or the complex interactions between them. These sounds reflect what is fragile, ever-changing, and at risk of disappearing.
Inspired by this topic and supported by the Music Technology Group, Phonos and the City Council of Pamplona, Amaia Sagasti, former researcher and member of the Freesound team at the Music Technology Group, has carried out an initiative to create a repository of sounds from the well-known San Fermín festival.
Every year from July 6th to July 14th, San Fermín takes place, and the city of Pamplona/Iruña (200,000 inhabitants) hosts more than 1 million visitors, transforming completely. Every corner of the city fills with music and people. Beyond its iconic red and white colors and the strong smell of wine, one thing that truly stands out during San Fermín is the richness of sounds that surround the celebration, giving the festival a very unique identity.
During 2025 San Fermín festivities, microphone in hand, Amaia made numerous audio recordings across a wide variety of events, now available on the Freesound platform in a sound pack titled “San Fermín”. These recordings include a wide range of sounds from San Fermín, from the traditional songs like “Aurora a San Fermín,” “Ánimo Pues,” and “No te Vayas de Navarra” sung by crowds, to the thrilling sounds of the famous running of the bulls and the txupinazo (firework) that kicks off the celebration. The result is an open repository that lets anyone immerse themselves in the festival; not only those who have lived it firsthand, but also those who would like to experience it one day. Each sound is accompanied by descriptions in English, Spanish, and Basque, as well as an image and its location. Below are some sounds selected from the pack.
July 6, 2025 – Recording of the “Gaiteros” or bagpipers playing “Ánimo pues”, after the Txupinazo that kicks off the San Fermín festival, at the Plaza Consistorial. The crowd sings along.
July 7, 2025 – Field recording of the Santiago Choir performing “Al Glorioso San Fermín” or “La jota de tu Navarra” at “Plaza del Consejo” during the San Fermin procession.
Field recording of “aizkolarak” or log cutters, a Basque-Navarrese rural sport at “Plaza de los Fueros” in Pamplona/Iruña during the San Fermín festival.
July 7, 2025 – Recording of La Pamplonesa band playing “Jerusalén” song during the San Fermin procession.
July 11, 2025 – Field recording of the running of the bulls. The ringing of bells, followed by the sound of a firework, indicate the start of the running of the bulls at 8 a.m. The bulls’ cowbells ring as they pass by.
July 7, 2025 – “Txistus” and “Gaitas” instruments accompany the “Gigantes” and “Cabezudos” during the San Fermín procession.
July 14, 2025 – Field recording of “Riau riau”, sung during the farewell of the “peñas” at the Pamplona Bullring, on the last day of San Fermin.
July 12th, 2025 – Recording of street “txalaparta” instrument, performed by Ugarte Anaiak.
July 7, 2025 – Field recording of Cristina Ramos performing “Que hizo a San Fermín llorar” at Calle Mayor during the San Fermin procession.
July 14, 2025 – Field recording of “Pobre de Mí,” the act that concludes the 2025 San Fermin festivities. The “Pobre de mí” and “1 de Enero” songs are sung by the crowd.
The sounds of the San Fermín festival, like so many others in our lives, are part of the intangible heritage that moves us and calls us to return; heritage that deserves to be preserved. With its extensive archive, Freesound offers a digital space where these sounds can be safeguarded and reimagined.
The collaborative digital platform Freesound, created in 2005 by the Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University, is celebrating its 20th anniversary, having become one of the largest databases of creative-commons licensed sounds in the world. With more than 700,000 shared recordings, Freesound has emerged as a reference for musicians, artists, researchers and creators around the world. To commemorate this anniversary, the CCCB is hosting a sound installation, curated by the Freesound team in collaboration with the artist Fito Conesa, which reflects on the concept of non-material legacies, the fragility of sound, and its value as intangible heritage.
The project installs a series of cavities and acoustic devices, which promote an intimate, deep listening, connecting us with the landscapes and the situations that make up our intangible heritage. The sounds heard in this installation have been selected by a group of artists who have been invited to explore the Freesound archive and select a playlist of “Sounds to Be Protected”: rare, unique or endangered recordings that spark a reflection on the future of our sound environment.
The installation will remain open from the 23rd to the 26th of October at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Full schedule here. The sounds selected for the installation can also be auditioned online, together with extra information for each of the playlists and the artists who curated them. You can find the digital version of the installation here: https://fs20.freesound.org/cccb/en
Decades from now, will the sound of rain be just a memory? Or a rarity? The celebration of Freesound’s 20th anniversary is also a call to preserve the acoustic memory of the world we live in.
Credits:
Installation curated by the Freesound team in collaboration with Fito Conesa
The acoustic devices were developed in collaboration with Plat Institute
The sound playlists were created by: Laura Llaneli, Alba Rihe, Roc Parés, Acoustic Heritage Collective, cantdefine.me, Cedrik Fermont, Albert Murillo, Eloïsa Matheu, Arnau Sala Saez, and Lolo & Sosaku
The Freesound Day is getting closer, and we are now able to announce the programme. For those who don’t know, the Freesound Day is an event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Freesound, and which will feature both the Freesound team and members of the community. Participants will share their personal and professional experiences with the platform, as well as highlight various projects that have emerged around it. It will happen on the 28thofOctober2025, at the Sala Aranyó of the Campus del Poblenou of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Even though the event will take place physically at the campus of our university in Barcelona, we are organising it so that online participation is possible.
The programme has been configured over the last months, and includes both invited talks and also the talks resulting from the Call for Talks announced in the Freesound blog some months ago. For those who can’t attend on the 28th of October, we’ll also make the talks available online later this year. The programme also includes a listening session of a selection of pieces from the Freesound 20th anniversary composition contest that was also announced earlier this year.
We hope you’ll enjoy that day and join us to celebrate Freesound!
If you are attending remotely, all you need to do is to join this Zoom meeting room: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/j/93968998691 (the room will be open 15 minutes before the start of the event)
Rutger Muller, Nikolai Gillissen, Ricky van Broekhoven (RutgerMuller)
Soundsystem for Silence – Creating Immersive Spaces with Emergent Patterns
Note: Some of the talks will happen live at the university campus, some others will be live through the Zoom meeting room, and some others will use a pre-recorded video. All of them will be streamed through the Zoom meeting room linked above.
The listening session of the Freesound 20th anniversary composition contest will feature the winning pieces of the contest, and a selection from the other submissions.
klanbeeld
River and village in 12 months
Ivan Manov
The Forgotten March of the Survakari
Beatrice Cioni
Risonanze Italiane
patnea
Echoes in the Fold
Edvina Fahlqvist and Christos Papasotiriou
Tierra Eterna
Victor Riera
Earth’s Lament
Bernardo González Castro
Relojes musicales
Christos Alexopoulos
Her Interplay
Sean Kinnear
Our Attempts (Leaves)
Diego Martinez
Sucesos irrecordables (Pouvoir tout dire)
Timothy Schmele
1972
Stefano Calvanese
MEMORIA CONDIVISA (Collective Memory)
TECNOBAITA
Free Peppino Sound
The Saucer Pilots
Waves of Memories
The listening session will NOT be streamed, but we are working on making all submitted compositions available online at a later time this year.
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.
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!
[Guest blog post by Anna Xambó on behalf of the Sensing the Forest Team]
Sensing the Forest (StF) is a project funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our goal is to raise awareness among forest visitors, artists, scientists, and the general public about the vital connection between forests and climate change. Our central research question is:
How can the use of artistic and community science research methods help to inform and educate people about climate change?
Specifically, we are exploring what we can learn by combining artistic approaches and community science with technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor forest behaviour and raise climate awareness. Listening, understood as a way of exploring and perceiving the world, is a key research method in this project. We promote listening through artistic interventions designed to harmonise with nature.
As part of StF, we have developed two DIY, solar-powered, off-grid audio streamers led by Luigi Marino, which are installed in Alice Holt Forest (see pictures below). These streamers act as listening and recording stations, capturing the sounds of the forest. Because they are placed in public outdoor spaces, occasional human voices may be recorded.
We are building two ongoing datasets from these automatic recordings, which will span between 6 and 12 months (depending on the device) and are being uploaded to Freesound:
installation dataset (https://freesound.org/people/sensingtheforest/packs/43504/): Dendrophone is a site-specific sound installation by Peter Batchelor located in Alice Holt Forest, Surrey, UK, that transforms local environmental data into immersive sound textures. These recordings are made directly from the installation’s multichannel output and capture both its generative soundscape and the ambient natural environment.
Recordings are captured at least four times a day, timed to solar events (sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and the midpoint between sunset and sunrise). We hope these recordings will also be valuable resources for the Freesound community.
Below are some selected sound examples from the natural soundscape dataset…
Quiet, bird singing, road, airplane, early morning at about 5:30 am (4 August 2024)
Heavy rain at about 1pm (5 September 2024)
Light (granular) rain at about 1am (30 September 2024)
(Early) bird singing at about 5am (31 May 2025)
…and now some selected examples from the installation dataset.
Nice blend with natureat around 3pm (17 March 2025)
Crackles blended with light rain/wind at around 3pm (18 March 2025)
Tubular bells at around 3pm (27 March 2025)
Forest breathing with planes in the background at about 1pm (19 May 2025)
Tubular bells blended with bird songs and a plane in the background at noon (28 May 2025)
– Anna Xambó on behalf of the Sensing the Forest Team
***
Anna Xambó is a researcher and an experimental electronic music producer. Her research and practice focus on sound and music computing looking at novel approaches to collaborative, participatory, and live coding experiences. She is a Senior Lecturer in Sound and Music Computing at the Centre for Digital Music (School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London) and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project “Sensing the Forest: Let the Forest Speak using the Internet of Things, Acoustic Ecology and Creative AI” (2023-2025).
As part of the 20th anniversary celebration program, there are two very exciting events that will take place next week in Barcelona, so be sure to check them out if you are around. The first event consists of the presentation of the piece BAR-CEL-ONA by the group Ekho, during the inaugural forum of Sónar+D music festival on the 12th of June. The second event consists of the sound installation Sound System for Silence, by the art collective Myubio, which will be open to the public from the 13th to the 21st of June at Can Framis museum, of Fundació Vila Casas. Both pieces have a particular relationship with Freesound as their authors are Freesound users and the pieces have been developed in collaboration with us. Here is more information about the two pieces:
BAR-CEL-ONA, by Ekho
On the 12th of June,Magda Polo (professor at the University of Barcelona and founder and director of the Ekho group) presents BAR-CEL-ONA at the Sónar+D 2025 festival to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Freesound platform. The piece, created using artificial intelligence, electronic music, and soundscapes from the open-access platform, advocates for a dissident form of listening — as formulated by Magda Polo — a listening through difference, emphasizing how we listen rather than what we listen to.
Using the sounds of the city, the Ekho group proposes a new sonic narrative, a sound portrait that goes beyond postcards, monuments, and urban clichés. “BAR,” “CEL,” and “ONA” symbolize the social spaces of streets, squares, parks, as well as the poetic horizons of the acoustic material that inhabits Barcelona, the sky, and the sea. The use of AI in the piece reveals hidden patterns that will be unveiled on the premiere day. Furthermore, as is always the case with Ekho’s works, the audience will take part.
The work not only celebrates twenty years of the Freesound platform — born, fittingly, in Barcelona — but also challenges dominant auditory hierarchies. It is an invitation to listen to what is normally marginalized, through an artistic and political practice aimed at the sensory transformation of both the individual and society.
The Ekho group, led by Magda Polo, also includes Adrien Faure, Toni Costa, and Nerea Martínez.
Soundsystem for Silence is an immersive installation inspired by the emergent patterns of nature. Using a constellation of ‘living’ sound sources, the installations sets in motion tiny fluctuations that cascade into complex shapes and movements. Aural worlds continuously emerge, evolve, disappear. Balancing between chaos and equilibria, the installation offers a new way of listening.
Celebrate 20 years of Freesound with us! We source all our sounds from this worldwide, collaborative platform – based in Barcelona. Congratulations Freesound.org!
Soundsystem for Silence is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and the Phonos Foundation.
Myubio is the transdisciplinary sound art collective of spatial sound designer Ricky van Broekhoven, creative technologist Nikolai Gillissen and electroacoustic composer Rutger Muller.
The collective asks: is nature a composer? Can music emerge spontaneously from unpredictable mechanisms? Nature’s systems are in continuous flux. How does it transform chaos into patterns and rhythms?
Myubio reflects on this form of intelligence with installations that simulate emergence by fusing algorithms with soundscape ecology taxonomies.
As part of the celebrations of the 20th Anniversary of Freesound, we are organising a“Freesound Day” event that will happen on the 28th of October of 2025. The Freesound Day will include talks from members of the Freesound communityand/or projects and initiatives related to Freesound. Also, it will host live performances with the selected pieces from the composition contest that was announced earlier this year.
Even though the event will take place physically at the Campus Poblenou of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, we are organising it so that online participation is possibleand welcomed. Of course, it would be wonderful if some of you could make it to Barcelona! If you check early enough, you might be able to find more affordable travel and accommodation options 🙂
If you are interested to participate in the event by giving a talk, please fill out the form linked below to tell us what you’d like to talk about. The talk can be about anything that has to do with your sound practice in relation to Freesound. Maybe tell us about how you use Freesound? Or tell us about some anecdotes related to Freesound? Or tell us about your projects, and how Freesound has been useful for them?
You will be able to give the talk either in remote through videoconferencing, here at the campus, or with a pre-recorded video. We expect talks to be no longer than 10-15 minutes. We will try to fit all the proposed talks in the schedule, but if there are too many proposals, then we will need to make a selection. In any case, we’ll keep you posted about the process. The deadline for submitting talk proposals is the 30th of June. After that date, the form will be closed.
Thanks a lot for your participation, we are looking forward to hear about your stories!
We are happy to announce that we have just released a new feature for organising sounds in Freesound. Following recent research at the MTG, we reached to the definition of a sound taxonomy named “Broad Sound Taxonomy” (BST). That was informed from a user experiment which was carried out some months ago, and in which was open to all Freesound users. Now we finally introduce the BST in Freesound as an additional tool to improve sound searching and browsing. The Broad Sound Taxonomy is designed to be simple and easy to use, and consists of 5 categories and 24 subcategories. Below is a figure showing the structure of the BST. More information about the taxonomy can be found in the BST section of the help page.
From now on, when uploading sounds you’ll have to select one of the categories and subcategories of BST. In the search page, you’ll see BST categories and subcategories as filtering facets. Sounds that are not annotated (such as those uploaded before the release of the feature) will be automatically assigned a category by an algorithm. Also, you’ll see information about the category of a sound in the sound page. If the category was added by an algorithm and not by the sound uploader, this will be indicated. But algorithms do fail sometimes, so such categories can be edited by uploaders. Feel free to edit your uploaded sounds and assign categories yourself! Here there are some screenshots of the new feature:
New section in the sound description form Example of a sound page indicating the BST category and subcategory Another example of a sound page, in that case the category and subcategory have been assigned by an algorithm (note the robot icon)
Because of these changes, we are reindexing all sounds in the search engine, so you will see some sounds missing until the process is complete in the next couple of hours.
We hope you enjoy the new feature in your future searches:)
Believe it or not, Freesound is turning 20 years old in 2025! We couldn’t be prouder of what Freesound has become after all these years. Freesound numbers are growing year after year (if you have not done it yet, have a look at our last Freesound in numbers blog post), and the incredible collection of sounds that you’ve been contributing to has an enormous value for millions of people all over the world. Freesound is not only the biggest website where sounds are freely shared under Creative Commons licenses, but it is also an open archive that captures the sound of the world.
Because 20 is a very special anniversary number, we want to celebrate it in a special way. We normally celebrate Freesound’s birthdate on the 5th of April, but for this occasion, we are organising a number of activities that will span through the whole year. Also we’ve chosen a main theme for the celebration, which is that of Freesound sounds as an archive to safeguard the world’s Intangible Heritage. 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.
The first activity we want to announce for the celebration of the 20th anniversary is a Freesound-based composition contest to explore the theme of Intangible Heritage. We have just published the terms of the contest on the Phonos website, and we encourage the Freesound community to participate! The deadline for submitting compositions is the 31st of May 30th of June, 2025. The selected compositions will be published online, ensuring open access and alignment with Freesound’s mission of fostering collaboration and sharing within the global community. Furthermore, a Freesound live event will take place on the 28th of October at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, in which the selected works will be presented with the possibility for the authors of performing live both on site or remotely.
Besides the presentation of the selected works of the composition contest, the Freesound live event we are planning for October will also include talks from members of the Freesound community and, of course, from the Freesound team at Phonos/Music Technology Group. The event will be live streamed and it will be possible to participate remotely, but we will also encourage participation on site. We will post more information about that event and how to participate in due time.
We would also like to announce that we are working on a sound installation that also explores the theme of Intangible Heritage through the lens of Freesound, and that will premiere this fall in a very nice exhibition hall in Barcelona. This installation is being developed with the curation of Fito Conesa, and will also feature a virtual version so that it can be enjoyed by the community at large. Again, we will let you know more about the installation in due time.
There will be other things happening during the year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Freesound, but we can’t unveil them all just yet 😉. We’ll keep you posted! Meanwhile, feel free to celebrate the anniversary by getting creative and uploading new sounds with the tag #freesound20. We can then display them all together in here.
We would like to finish this post by giving enormous thanks to all the people that contributes to Freesound: people who upload sounds, people who download sounds, people who donate, the team of moderators and support, researchers and developers at Fundació Phonos and the Music Technology Group (where Freesound happens), IT and administration staff at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, artists, developers and companies that use API to integrate Freesound sounds in their projects, funding bodies that supported research grants related to Freesound, and all the people who will contribute in the future. 20 years is not something that happens by chance. This can only have happened thanks to your effort and dedication.
2025 has arrived and this will be a very special year for Freesound! We will let you know soon about a number of things happening this year, but before that, it is time for the 2024 in numbers blog post. We will show some general statistics similar to those shown in previous years’ posts. But to make it a little bit different, this year we have also included a section with statistics related to search queries. So let’s get started: the number of new sounds uploaded during 2024 has been of…
56,964 new sounds!
which corresponds to…
1157 hours of audio!
There have been ~7,924 more uploaded sounds during 2024 when compared to 2023. However, in terms of hours of audio hours, the increase has been of 23 hours only. In 2023 there was an unusually high average sound duration, but in 2024 we see an average sound duration of 73 seconds, very similar to 2022 and other previous years. Therefore the numbers are not surprising.
Here is the Creative Commons license distribution of the newly uploaded sounds:
Distribution of licenses for the sounds uploaded in 2024
In 2024, the percentage of Attribution NonCommercial sounds has remained similar with previous years, but there’s a significant change in Attribution sounds. Attribution has increased significantly, surpassing Creative Commons 0 for the first time (45% vs. 44%). Historically, Creative Commons 0 accounted for about 60% of contributions, while Attribution was around 25%. It’s too early to determine the cause of this shift, but one possibility is that sound contributors are responding to concerns about generative AI by becoming less willing to share sounds in the public domain. What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments!
With the new additions from 2024, Freesound now currently hosts a stunning amazing total of 670,954 sounds. The total audio duration is of 476 days and 4 hours. Here is the evolution of the total number of sounds since the beginning of Freesound, and the prediction for the future:
Total number of uploaded sounds and prediction for the future
We will still need to wait a couple of years until we reach 1M sounds, but we will surely surpass the 700k mark during 2025 🙂
Here is a tag cloud of the tags of the sounds uploaded during 2024:
“Tag cloud” of the most used tags in 2024
If we compare this tag cloud to last year’s one, we’ll see that there are number of big words that have appeared which were not common (e.g. soundtrack, industrial, underground, dark, loopable). The usual suspects are still relevant (e.g. field-recording, ambient, drum, synth), but their relative size has been diminished. We have already seen many times how, even if many sounds are uploaded every year by many contributors, it is definitely possible for a single user uploading many sounds to change the distribution of the most used tags. And this is what is happening this year. User looplicator has contributed an immense quantity of sounds this year (see below), and many of them use some of the tags that I listed above. Here you can see a list of the packs uploaded by looplicator.
Tired of reading? Do you simply want to listen to some sounds? Here are some of the better-rated/most-downloaded sounds of 2024:
And after this intermission, let’s continue with the classic chart of the users who have contributed the most sounds in 2024:
As we already hinted before, this year we have a clear “winner” in both number of sounds and number of audio hours. But hey, this is not really about winning or losing, thanks everyone (not only those appearing in the table) for all the contributions!
And what about downloads? The number of sound downloads (including packs) during 2024 was…
18,786,432 downloads!
Even though this number is slightly lower to that of last year, this is still an incredible amount of downloads. All in all, users have downloaded more than 254M soundsand packs from Freesound!
Now some extra general statistics: In 2024, 14k messages were sent, 1k forum posts, were written, 444k sound ratings were made, 26k sound comments were written. Sound comments have decreased by 40%, but sound ratings have been increased almost a 100% (so they have almost doubled!). Sound ratings were already at an increasing tendency, so this is great news that the tendency is confirmed. One possible explanation is that the new UI released at the end of 2023, invites users to provide more ratings (which was one of the design goals!). We’ll have to see how these numbers continue evolving in the following years.
The term cloud below shows the most common query terms that have been used when searching in Freesound during 2024:
“Term cloud” of the most used search in 2024
The top 10 terms are very similar to those of previous years, with slight variations in the ordering: wind, rain, explosion, music, whoosh, footsteps, woosh, click. However, there are some new terms vivaldi, spring, and bird which were not normally at the top. We believe this is due to some bot activity as almost all of these queries originate from a single place, so we should not read this as the Freesound community suddenly growing an interest for Vivaldi. The term-cloud above is generated using raw search data, but a deeper analysis on this data can reveal some things interesting for the community. This is something that we usually don’t have time to look into, but this year we have computed some extra nice statistics about how users search in Freesound, so we’ll finish this blog post with a special section about that :).
Let’s start by looking at the question of when do people search? Search activity on Freesound is a round-the-clock phenomenon, though some patterns emerge when we look at the data. Unsurprisingly, activity peaks during weekday afternoons and early evenings (UTC), when the number of queries per hour reaches close to 15,000. Conversely, the quietest times fall during the late-night hours, dropping to about 7,000 queries per hour.
Number of hourly queries per day of the week
To break this down further, the platform processes an average of 4 requests per second during peak hours and around 2 requests per second overnight. While the overall distribution aligns with global waking hours, the consistency of activity at all hours highlights Freesound’s international user base and its role as a creative tool across time zones.
We also looked at what type filters are being used in search queries. When it comes to narrowing down search results, tags take center stage. Tags accounted for over 57% of filter usage, far ahead of other filters like licensing (15.4%) or file type (5.9%). This likely reflects the importance of keywords in categorising and locating specific sounds in Freesound’s extensive library.
Most used filter types in user queries
As can be seen from the pie chart, filters related to Creative Commons licenses are also widely used, with license:”Creative Commons 0″ being a particularly common choice. This underscores the importance of freely reusable content for the Freesound community.
Interestingly, filters such as bit depth (16 or 24 bits) and sample rate (44.1 kHz or 48 kHz) are also frequently used. These technical attributes are crucial for users working in professional contexts, like sound design or film production, where specific audio quality standards must be met.
And what about the sorting of search results? The vast majority of search queries use the default sorting behaviour, Automatic by relevance, with over 81% of requests. Other sorting options, like Date added (newest first) – (11.9%) -, Downloads (most first) – (2.1%) -, and Ratings (highest first) – (1.7%) -, were far less common, though they reveal specific user priorities. For instance, sorting by newest entries suggests a focus on exploring fresh content, while downloads likely indicate interest in popular sounds. What is somehow surprising is that the option of sorting by sound average rating does not hold a bigger percentage, as this is a useful tool to get high-quality sounds! Maybe it means that the average sound quality in Freesound is high enough so that there is no need to sort by ratings.
To deepen our understanding of what users are looking for, we draw from a recent paper presented at the DCASE 2024 Workshop (an academic event that we usually attend, mainly dedicated to computational methods for the detection and classification of acoustic scenes and events). This research examined Freesound search queries to classify their content and identify patterns. A key finding was that users’ searches often fall into diverse, overlapping categories, visualized in the sunburst chart below:
Classification of user queries into semantic concepts
Music-related queries (e.g., instruments, genres, moods) and natural sounds (e.g., animals, water, fire) are consistently popular.
Human sounds and sounds of things (e.g., mechanical noises, alarms, explosions) highlight Freesound’s value for media production projects.
The source-ambiguous sounds category, including thuds, beeps, and whooshes, stands out as an example of Freesound’s appeal for crafted and designed audio. These sounds often play a pivotal role in sound design, where their flexibility makes them invaluable.
The study also revealed unique aspects of search vocabulary. Users frequently employ specialized terms like jargon (e.g., “riser,” “stinger”), abbreviations (e.g., “bgm,” “atmo”), and descriptions of intended use (e.g., “error,” “alert,” “game over”). This illustrates the specificity of Freesound’s audience, many of whom are professionals or hobbyists with clear creative goals.
And finally, let’s look at the query length. Interestingly, most queries on Freesound are short, typically only a few words. This matches findings in broader search behavior studies but raises intriguing questions. For instance, would it be beneficial for Freesound to adjust its default search settings to encourage users to submit longer, more descriptive queries? Could such a change unlock richer creative possibilities for the platform’s users? Or does the current “few words + filters” system just work and there’s no need for other strategies? Or something in between? These are all very interesting ideas, which essentially address the question of How do we humans talk about sound? How do we describeit and how would we like to interact with it? Well, surely we won’t find quick answers to these questions, but we can say that Freesound is definitely a great place to seek for them.
Aaaaaaand that is all for this year’s post, thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy a 2025 full of sounds!
frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team the special section discussing user search queries is a contribution by Benno Weck, thanks!
