Just beginning to catch up with my reading and posting - it's so hard travel between countries and keep up blogging - even when I tried queuing up some material - I could not create enough content to prevent interruptions (which I try to avoid, esp for a blog). Later today I'll have some movies to post on my trip to the rocky plateau of Bibémus but right now, I'm going to resume posting normally.
Via Cybernotes I found a search engine just for sounds called FindSounds. According to Ashley over at Cybernotes:
"..One thing that I haven’t seen with any of them is the ability to search for sounds. FindSounds.com is a website I recently came across that’s the perfect place to go on the web when you need to find a sound clip. It’s like the card catalog for sounds with just about any sound imaginable.
"…At FindSounds, you’re given the following options:
File formats– AIFF, AU, or WAVE Number of channels – Mono or stereo Minimum resolution (8–bit or 16–bit) Minimum Sample Rate (8000 Hz up to 44100Hz) Maximum File Size (16K up to 2MB)
"..Performing a search is easy. All you have to do is enter your search term in the search box, and it will pull up a list of options. I did a search for “waterfall,” and it returned 17 different sounds.
You can't find a sound for just anything, but I was able to find sounds for "wind"
Sounds 1-10 of 164 labelled "wind"
1.
http://www.armegalo.co.uk/sound/data/ambient/windywhistle.wav
wind
55k, mono, 16-bit, 22050 Hz, 1.3 seconds(show page |e-mail this sound) 2.
http://www.weru.ksu.edu/new_weru/multimedia/audio/wind9.wav
wind
43k, mono, 8-bit, 11025 Hz, 4.0 seconds(show page |e-mail this sound)
You can also get a low cost program that allows much more customization called FindSounds Palette
"..Hollywood sound designers know well that useful and interesting sounds can be obtained by changing the speed of an audio recording. FindSounds Palette makes it easy to change speeds, and for each audio file in your collection, the sounds of 25 different speeds can be searched. This turns a collection of 10,000 audio files into a searchable database of 250,000 sounds!
You can also search audio files on the Web at multiple speeds, which gives you access to an enormous and growing collection of 1,000,000+ sounds."
Being that I just took a lot of video footage of France (and beginning to video-blog regularly in NYC) I can use sound files to mix in with the videos this way.
But the idea here is that search is moving beyond textual data to include qualities of the files (data) itself. Honestly, I don't see how else they can do this kind of search as metadata around sounds embedded on web-pages is not specified using Metadata often enough - so searching for sounds much involve capturing any sound files their crawlers come across and then processing them to determine what kind of sound it is.
And that makes me wonder how far we're away form crawling and understanding the meaning of rich media files.
