[idioma original: inglês] Bram - Freesound - freesound.iua.upf.edu
Entrevista realizada por email por Karla S. Brunet - Outubro 2005
You say “Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.” What inspired you to do the project? How/from where did you get the idea?
Bram: The initial idea to make a shared database of sounds came from Xavier Serra, the director of our Group. I took this idea and shaped it into a practical, networked database and did the research to figure out the legalities and technicalities of freesound.
My background is collaborative sites (http://www.smartelectronix.com and http://www.musicdsp.org) so I was lucky to be the right person at the right time to work on this when I sent my CV to MTG!
In the website is written “Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License” Why do you want that? What are your intentions with the project? Is there a cause behind it? An ideology?
Bram: There's a few reasons. First of all, because we 'can'. We have the technology and the university has the bandwidth. But there are other reasons: this years ICMC (http://www.icmc2005.org) had the theme of "free sound" and we wanted to do something with that theme. Freesound was a logical progression. Other than that, having a large database of sounds is interesting for research. MTG develops algorithms that devise ways of browsing through collections of sounds (http://musicsurfer.iua.upf.edu/). Other universities work on algorithms that use large databases of sound to create new and interesting compositions and ... other sounds
("mozaiking" or "feature driven synthesis"). All of this research and art is hard to do, because large sets of audio are expensive. Freesound with it's creative commons license fixes that problem.
Why did you choose to use a collaborative platform on “Freesound Project”? Why is important multi-user?
Bram: The reason is simple. It's impossible to create a sufficiently large database on your own. You need the help from a LOT of people. By offering interesting functionality to the user (browsing, searching, downloading, interacting) you draw him to freesound. And, hopefully, he will contribute!
As I see in your website you have a high level of participation, a great number of audio files and communication. Since the project is new, how to you attract collaboration? Do you thing that the press “Freesound Project” got during the ICMC 2005 was a good help? What do you do to attract people to the project? and do you instigate them to contribute?
Bram: Sadly enough ICMC 2005 wasn't THAT important to Freesound. In my opinion there are a few things that helped immensely for freesound. First of all the MASSIVE coverage in blogs on the web. People talked about freesound and thus it became popular. Being listed (via banners) on sites like http://www.kvraudio.com, http://www.em411.com, and on the search page of the creative commons website and last but not least my own smartelectronix attracted a lot of people.
Also, having a website which has good indexing capabilities helps. Google crawls freesound very well (have a look at the page TITLE's in freesound!) as all content is text-based. Strange searches like http://www.google.com/search?q=car+door+wav result in very high positioning of freesound. The freesound siteindex in google is amazing due to the high blog coverage.
Adding the geotagging features resulted in yet another blogging 'attack', increasing popularity among the geotagging crowd.
Are you happy with the level of participation in “Freesound Project”? Did you expect more or less? Is that effective in your opinion? Are you achieving your goals?
Bram: I expected exactly what we're getting:
229 users uploaded something
15115 users downloaded something
ratio: 1.51%
So about '1.5' out of 100 people actually contribute. This is very much what I've seen on other websites. Obviously it would be nice if the ratio was higher, but it is unrealistic to think it would be higher. There is a large schism between active and passive participation on the web.
For how long do you plan to have “Freesound Project” on the net? Is there a fixed time for its duration or not? Any future features to be added? I say that in a way because an active website is time consuming, so do you plan to be involved with the project forever?
Bram: Freesound is proving to be more time consuming than anything I've ever made. I hope to work on it for as long as possible, but it will be difficult without additional funding from somewhere. It is very hard to explain to people that "not working on it" means certain death for a site like this. People in general seem to think that once a site is "made" it doesn't need any more work, which is obviously not the case.
