As mentioned last week, the OLPC project has provided some 8.5GB of Creative Commons-licensed sound. Unfortunately, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the servers didn’t stand up to its instant popularity. Good news — most of the content is available now via torrent, with additional content on the Internet Archive.

We need a Few Good Seeds, so grab that torrent and seed it! (I am…)

Official OLPC sound samples page

Internet Archive links

olpc-sound-samples on Mininova (should be on other trackers, as well)

And previously…

8.5 GB of Free, CC-Licensed Samples from the OLPC Project, and OLPC Music Tools

Oh, yeah, and no one need feel guilty about using the samples. That was kind of the idea. (Not to mention, this could be a good sample source for working on projects for the OLPC.)

If music technology has ever made you dream of autonomous musical robots, crawling around the floor making sound like a Juilliard of mechanical insect prodigies, I’ve got great news for you.

While we’re on the subject of DIY electronics, here are some words of encouragement: the designer who made that fantastic drum machine robot making the rounds on the Web says he’s got a day job, and you, too, can do what he did.

Yes, you.

First, check out the autonomous, banging-on-stuff and sampling drummer robot pictured above, if you haven’t seen it yet:

Robot Drum Machine Roams, Samples, Bangs On Stuff

Creator Frits Lyneborg (aka fristl) writes CDM (after hurdling our spam filters — sorry about that):

Hi there - Yes I am out there, and next to me is some sticks & wires & some yellow belt tracks :D

Thanks for all the street-credit etc, thank you so very much. I hope my next robot / next weekend can live up to this, lol!

I am CEO of bee3.com - consider this brilliant company next time you want a website. Well - what else to do with my 15 minutes of fame, if not an ad for my company ;)

Anyway - it is very easy to make these robots, seriously; I do not have much of a clue, I just have plenty of glue. Hey - what a little fame can bring up in you, rhyming now, so muzical :)

i have made a walk through on how to make a quite capable robot, that uses all the same basics, and it only takes 2 hours once you got the parts send by mail.. letsmakerobots.com

Trust me; it is fun and easy to build robots!

Still skeptical? Here’s an even simpler design:

Troels Folmann is one of our favorite composers at CDM. The fact that he’s a game composer both incidental and essential — it’s not that he’s scoring a Tomb Raider title that matters, it’s that game composition requires a new, fluid way of thinking about form, and Dr. Folmann (he did a dissertation topic on the subject) is up to the challenge.

Digging through recent entries on Troels’ blog is definitely a source of weekend inspiration. I’m fond of found samples, but I tend to record sound making things around the house up close with a mobile recorder for a more intimate sound. Troels drags them over to a concert hall and uses the natural reverb to turn a candle light holder and Coke bottle into something that sounds like massive, tribal percussion. To keep himself disciplined, he limited himself to objects in a random photo. Here’s what it sounds like:

To add to the ambience, he uses the Timefreezer plug-in ($99 for Mac, Windows, Mac Intel, the lot). As the name implies, it “freezes” samples of sound as an effect or instrument. I’ve done some similar things as DIY patches, but it sounds like they’ve done a nice job of implementation.

This approach to sampling percussion with natural reverb, and making an art of the samples, is part of why they pay Troels the big bucks. Be sure to hear his percussion demo for more of the sounds. Little wonder that he blogs the meditation on autism that’s been making the YouTube rounds: sampling sounds requires an almost extrasensory focus on the world around us that we spend most of our time shutting out.

So there you have some fiddling with household objects. What about this “future of adaptive music” business?

Free, odd soundware keeps on coming — hot on the heels of faux bent instruments and a tape-recorded Roland 606 and 808, here are more sounds to satisfy your need for unusual sounds.

Stephen Haunts was inspired by the cassette-recorded 808, and writes to tell us he’s decided to give something back. He’s uploaded 22 kits from a Korg ElecTribe ER-1, a kit from a Yamaha DD-10 (pictured amusing the awkward fellow at right from the manual), and a Yamaha PSS-80. The Yamahas steal the show: they’re little toy keyboards with a decidedly lo-fi sound. I always admired the Japanese sound designers for their minimalism on these low-end hardware units. You almost don’t need to circuit bend this.

Free Drum Machine Samples by Creature [Haunted House Records]

Stephen, aka Creature, used these samples for his Distant Horizon album featured in Mike Una’s round-up of music from the forums.

Toy drums not to your liking? How about a toy music box instead?

Our friend Tom at Music Thing has repaired and sampled his Fisher Price record player music box, then uploaded the results to the open source soundware site Freesound:

Sampling a Fisher Price Music Box Record Player [Music Thing]

You may remember said Fisher Price kit from the tongue-in-cheek Fisher Price turntable “review” by DJ Tech Tool’s Ean Golden.

What’s great about both these sound collections is they’re actually different enough to give you some real inspiration musically. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to take my handheld recorder around the house and grab some other sounds.

There’s a disturbing amount of free sound-making stuff out there, enough to clutter up your VST folder and make you forget where you put that multi-tap delay you wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. So, as a regular, erm, public service, I’ll be semi-regularly rounding up some of the free instruments and effects appearing around the Interwebs.

This week: a brilliantly deep reverb, plus everything from a beat box (as in human beat box) to a motorcycle simulator.

How do you make the Moog legacy of instruments accessible — assuming you can’t afford a studio full of vintage gear? One choice is to model the instruments virtually, as developers like Arturia have done. That provides real-time control, but models may not be perfect, and if you want more than one instrument, you really need more than one model. Others have reimagined some of the Moog sound designs on more modern instruments, as Craig Anderton did recently with Cakewalk’s Rapture.

IK Multimedia, working with veteran sample house Sonic Reality in collaboration with Moog Music, have taken the “museum” approach — put samples of everything in a single box. And what an ambitious collection they’ve got, as we noted when the product was announced. But can you win over even someone who owns some of the real gear? We put that question to our own Lee Sherman, who’s been diving deep into the tool. Mindful of the tradeoffs, he’s got some insight into just how useful they were able to make that sampled content.

SampleMoog can’t help but be greeted with some degree of skepticism. Even virtual analog synths like Arturia’s Minimoog V don’t go all of the way in reproducing the Moog experience. How can something based on samples even come close?

I think Hank Shocklee’s contribution to Public Enemy, as a producer and co-founder, had a deep influence on the approach to sampled sound and digital sound ever since. In Brisbane, Australia in December, I got to sit in a room full of students at the Art of Record Production conference and listen to Shocklee walk through the album "Fear of a Black Planet." I realized it was a bit like needle-dropping Sgt. Pepper with George Martin.

Shocklee describes his role with Public Enemy as a kind of teacher, helping Chuck D, poet, meet digital production technology. In the years since, he’s expanded that teaching role to include young people around the world, and he’s got some strong opinions about the importance of learning the craft of recording and music in general.

Fittingly, we sat down for a few moments in a classroom.

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. I - On music making from cdm tv on Vimeo.

What a lot of people may not know about Hank Shocklee is that beyond being a Public Enemy veteran, he’s also been deeply involved in the music industry. Unlike so many armchair industry quarterbacks, Shocklee has worked with the major artists (from Madonna to Peter Gabriel) and had a significant stint as Senior Vice President for Universal MCA Records. That means when Shocklee criticizes the industry as musically illiterate, he speaks from the perspective of someone who’s been on both the inside and outside of the majors. (He’s now producing and scoring music independently, and drove his entrepreneurial spirit into his own Shocklee Entertainment.)

Criticizing is one thing — but Shocklee had advice for how artists can guide the direction of their own career. He talks about the limitations of the industry, how the music community can grow beyond it, and how visual media could finally become a serious domain for musicians. (We agree with that.)

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. II - On music business from cdm tv on Vimeo.

Pristine digital technology — some people just can’t resist putting it in the service of recreating grungier, noisier sound-producing tech. Hot on the heels of Indirect-to-Digital - by-way-of-tape samples of the TR606 and 808, here are some digital recreations of circuit-bent noisemakers. Of course, I generally prefer to see circuit bending producing actual, DIY hardware — see our Circuit Bending Challenge — but it’s still an interesting exercise. (And it’s worth sampling some of this gear for live performance, especially when you can record sound before something, um, breaks. At least if it’s my project.)

Rekkerd.org finds not one, but two projects:

• Eric Beam releases Circuit Bent TR-505 samples, samples of a bent TR-505 “DeComposer”, captured “with pristine TC-Electronic A/D converters.” (What, no Marantz portable? The hardware in-progress pictured above.)
• de la Mancha releases Bent, a free “circuit-bent resynthesis” effect, with tempo-sync granulator effects, and jittering, morphing, and jittering morphing pitch. Windows VST.

De la Mancha’s stuff is great, and with some granular effects, you get a “bent” creation that can only exist in software. In fact, maybe “faux” is unfair in that case. Software doesn’t have the reputation of hardware circuit bending, and there’s not the immediacy of a contact point on a physical circuit. But you can certainly find just as many, if not more, strange and organically accidental “discoveries” when working with code and patches.