“Finds of an audio man”: sound cards as a way to plunge into the atmosphere of an unfamiliar city

Cards of sounds (sound maps) are called geographical maps, which are applied to all sorts of audio information. Today we will tell about several such services.

^{Photo Kelsey Knight / Unsplash}

In our blog on Habré -> Reading for the weekend: 65 materials about streaming, the history of the old "musical iron", audio technologies and the history of acoustic manufacturers

Radio garden

This is a service with which you can listen to radio stations from around the world. It was launched in 2016 by engineers from the Netherlands Institute of Image and Sound as part of a research project for the university. But at the beginning of 2019, one of the authors founded the Radio Garden company and is now engaged in supporting a web application.

At Radio Garden you can listen to country music from the American hinterland , Buddhist radio in Tibet, or Korean pop music ( K-POP ). The map even marked a radio station in Greenland (so far the only one) and in Tahiti . By the way, you can help expand the geography - to offer a radio station, you need to fill out a special form .

^{Screenshot: radio.garden / Plays: Rocky FM in Berlin}

You can add your favorite stations to your favorites to make it easier to return to them. Although with the help of Radio Garden it makes sense only to look for an interesting radio - listening to music is better on the official pages of audio streams (they are given direct links in the upper right corner of the screen). After some time in the background, the web application begins to consume a large amount of resources.

Radio aporee maps

The project was launched in 2006. His task is to build a global sound map of the world. The site works on the principle of "crowdsourcing", that is, anyone can fill up the collection of sounds. The rules that the site sets for the quality of audio can be found here (for example, the bitrate should be 256/320 Kbps). All sounds are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

^{Screenshot: aporee.org / Entries in Moscow - many of them were made in the subway}

Project participants download audio recordings with the sounds of city parks, subways, noisy streets and stadiums. On the site you can listen to how the “ promenade ” in Hong Kong “sounds,” the train on the railway in Poland and the reserve in Puerto Rico . They will clean your shoes in Times Square and pour a cup of coffee in a Dutch cafe . Someone attached a note of the Mass at Notre Dame de Paris .

The site runs a fairly convenient search - you can search for certain sounds as well as specific places on the map.

Everynoise

The author of the project is Glenn MacDonald. He is an engineer at The Echo Nest, a Spotify- owned company that develops machine listening technology.

Everynoise's “map” is a bit unusual and differs significantly from the previous two. The audio information on it is presented in the form of a “directional” tag cloud . This cloud contains the names of the order of 3300 thousand musical subgenres. All of them were distinguished by a special machine algorithm, which analyzed and categorized about 60 million tracks on Spotify.

^{Screenshot: everynoise.com / The most “smooth” instrumental compositions}

Instrumental genres are located at the bottom of the page, and electronic ones at the top. “Smooth” compositions are placed on the left, and more rhythmic ones on the right.

Among the distinguished genres, one can find both quite familiar ones like Russian rock or punk rock, as well as unusual ones, for example, viking metal, latin tech house, zapstep, buffalo ny metal and cosmic black metal. Examples of compositions can be heard by clicking on the corresponding tag.

To follow the emergence of new genres that Everynoise developers regularly highlight, you can subscribe to the project’s official page on Twitter.