The Freesound Project's First Competition

I've been meaning to do a spot on the Freesound Project for a quite a while, and now that they are holding their first competition the time is right. First, what is the Freesound Project? They summarize themselves nicely on top of their main page:

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.

Basically, sound artists upload sounds they have created, be it found sound they've recorded out in the field, guitar licks in their studio, or strange sounds they synthesized. The sounds are all under a Creative Commons "Sampling Plus 1.0" license, so they are free to use pretty much any way you want. They only real restriction is that you must give credit to the sound's authors if you use them, and you can't use them to advertise.

The real beauty is that the site tracks which sounds you've downloaded for you and will print out a nice summary report to make it easy to give attribution when it comes time. This is so, so nice. I can't tell you how often I've putting the finishing touches on a song and have no idea anymore where I got all the samples from.

On to the competition:

The First Freesound Competition!

Freesound, M-Audio and Soundman together with Computer Music Magazine proudly present the first Freesound competition. Themed as "Earth, Wind, Fire and Water" this competition will use The Freesound Project as the setting for the oldest battle on this planet: the battle of the elements!

The rules

You have to upload at least 4 samples, each one themed as one of the elements. You have to record or synthesize these samples, one for "earth", one for "wind", one for "water" and one for "fire". If you feel like entering more than once in the competition, that's ok, just upload another set of 4 (you could put them in sample packs). You need to give your samples a good description (bad descriptions will be thrown in the garbage bin) and you need to tag them (next to the regular descriptive tags) with the tags "earth" or "wind" or "fire" or "water" depending on the sound...

The competition will run until the end of March 2006.

The prize

Instead of cutting up the prize in separate pieces, we've decided to go with a "winner takes all" approach. And what a prize it is! You get the M-Audio Microtrack, a flash-based miniature audio recorder, one superb set of the Soundman in-ear microphones -perfect for fieldrecording- and the audio-processing/mastering effects suite Ozone from Izotope, to finalize your sound.

Get your microphones ready! Go!