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The sound of the world

Musicologists at the University of Freiburg have started a unique project to research the diversity of sound.

16.02.2015
© dpa/Nils Thies/CHROMORANGE - Soundcaching

Just close your eyes and concentrate on the sounds. What do you hear? A bable of voices and footsteps in the street, a gaggle of sparrows chirping in-between, and somewhere in the background a shrill screech. Probably the tram. The world is full of noise. Even the most remote countryside is almost never really silent.

A workgroup at the Musicological Institute of the University of Freiburg want to capture the immense diversity of sounds digitally. To this end, the young researchers are developing a publicly accessible platform. As soon as it is online, anyone can take part; all you need is a smartphone. Users can then record an interesting sound and send it, including its precise GSM location, to the portal. Its inventors call this “sound caching”. It also includes sending a short description of the recorded sound: what it is and how it sounds.

The project “Sound Caching”

“We orient ourselves in our environment very much to sounds”, says the director of the study Rainer Bayreuther. “We want to explore this fact.” The project operates according to the principle of a so-called “real laboratory”: the experimental set-up is set to change regularly depending on what happens at the platform, how the participants deal with the possibilities and what preferences they have. The collected sounds are of interest not only to musicology and science, but also, for instance, to museum education.

The Freiburg team was one of the winners of the 2014 German University Award. The award, which is worth € 10,000, served as start-up funding for the project. The project is now funded by the Mainz-based Strecker Foundation. Negotiations for additional funding are being conducted with potential partners in industry and culture. The platform expects to go online early in the summer of 2015.

www.muwi.uni-freiburg.de

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