Tim Nielsen, Sound Designer, Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer at Skywalker Sound set up a crowdsourced recording project to raise money for the charity 'The Water Project', which aims to provide clean water for people in Africa. For a donation of at least $99, for a limited period, it was possible to get access to this unique sound library, but that opportunity has passed now. In this article, Tim tells the story of this unique library.

Earlier this year Al Sirkett had an idea. When lockdowns started to occur around the world, he asked people to record the sound. The project became the library that is called Ambient Isolation, a fascinating collection of ambiences from around the world. Even though I missed the deadline to take part, even learning about it too late, the idea still intrigued me.

A Bit Of History

Crowd-sourced libraries have existed for years. There is a vibrant community of people on the Slack group Field Recording who have been running them for years. They started small, 5-10 people, coming together to record a common theme, and then sharing the recordings. Lately, these projects have grown in size and quality. So far, the Field Recording group has recorded over 45,000 sounds as part of their crowd-sourced projects.

Start Small

This summer as part of that community I ran a smaller crowd-sourced library based on the idea of collecting Room Tones; something I always felt I was lacking, and something I knew would be safe for people to record and contribute. That library generated about 415 room tones and quiet interior spaces from people around the world. I was hooked.

Grow Bigger

I then had two ideas. First that it would be interesting to ask people to record outside their homes. Whatever they felt that meant, their yard, their street, neighborhood, city. Just exterior recordings of where they live. I felt important that whatever project we did next, it would still have to be safe for people to record. And second, I wanted to go bigger. I knew that there were thousands of people around the world who recorded, and through social media, I thought I could potentially reach some of them.

The idea for the My Home Crowd-Source was born. The last piece of the puzzle was the decision that we would use this money to raise money for a good charity. Kai Paquin may have been one of the first to decide to use the crowd-sourced community to raise money for charity, putting together the wonderful Cartoon and Impacts libraries, which have raised thousands of dollars for charity. I knew that in these times, I wanted to also try and use this project, this community, for a good cause.

The Water Project

After quite a bit of research, I chose The Water Project. Having travelled a bit in places where clean water is just not something you assume. I was impressed with the simple aim of this wonderful charity which is to provide safe water to as many people as possible. It was important to me as well that the charity in question was highly rated, trustworthy and effective. The Water Project fits that bill on all fronts. As soon as I discovered them, I knew this was the charity I wanted to promote and help.

Universal Category System To The Rescue

Running a crowd-sourced project can be a daunting experience. There are the logistics of acquiring the files from participants, the issue of delivering the final library, and of course how to handle Metadata. Earlier this year, my first ‘I’m locked at home and need a project’ was to revisit an old category system that I made many years ago. That project, with the help of many others, ultimately became the Universal Category System.

Over the year, we’ve been using that system for ways to communally categorize these crowd-sourced libraries and it seems to work well. It offers a framework for the metadata, where in the past, you could usually expect chaos with each different user uploading whatever filename, metadata, that they wanted. UCS continues to grow and be adopted by many of the top vendors in the world, and anyone interested in learning more can explore the YouTube tutorials. But its existence, and the tools available with it, especially the UCS implementation in Soundminer, were crucial to running a project of this size.

The Project Was Opened

With the pieces in place, we opened the project and started to spread the word. And the project grew and grew. Over the two months, we were open for submissions, 615 recordists, from 62 countries, supplied 4,666 sounds and what they have assembled is an amazing library of ambient sounds from where people live, around the world. From cities to nature, urban to suburban. You can check the world map above to see where in the world all the different recordings were made.

The final library was so much bigger than we expected, coming in at 537 gigabytes for the WAV version, and 307GB for the FLAC version. The total running time for all the files is over 19 days, which probably makes this one of the latest collection of ambiences ever assembled.

How Do I Get This Ambient Sounds Library?

We have removed instructions on how to get it as the opportunity to get this library has closed.