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Frederic Font is a member of the *Freesound Team*.
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Frederic Font is a post-doc researcher at the Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Frederic Font holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2007) and a MSc in Sound and Music Computing from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2010). In 2015, he obtained a PhD in Sound and Music Computing from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lay in the field of sound and music computing, audio processing and the semantic representation of audio content, motivated by the creative potential that online communities of users have through online sound sharing sites such as Freesound. His current research is focused on understanding how to analyze and describe large sound collections so that these become more useful in creative contexts. This includes the use of a wide range of techniques from signal processing and machine learning to semantic representation of music information and analysis of user communities and their generated metadata. In the MTG, Frederic also leads the Freesound website and its related projects, and has coordinated the EU funded AudioCommons project.
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To the best of our knowledge, [Freesound](https://freesound.org) is the biggest website for sharing Creative Commons audio clips in the *observable universe*. It was started in 2005 as a research effort of the [Music Technology Group](https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg/) in [Universitat Pompeu Fabra](https://upf.edu), Barcelona. The initial goal was to gather a collection of audio clips that could be shared among researchers to carry out computational analysis of sounds and learn about them. Creative Commons licenses had been introduced to the world only a couple of years before, and it seemed a perfect fit for the goals of the Freesound platform. Currently Freesound hosts more than **430k audio clips** uploaded by more than **20k contributors**. Freesound sounds have been **downloaded more than 145M times** by **9M users** all over the world. It contains all sorts of sounds, from field recordings to music instrument samples, foley, speech and music loops; but not *songs* in the traditional sense of *finished music compositions*. The aim of Freesound is to provide audio *building blocks* to be transformed and combined into other sounds, and reused elsewhere. Here are some nice examples of the variety of sounds to be found in Freesound:
Freesound has been featured in the Creative Commons blog several times in the past: [here](https://creativecommons.org/2005/04/12/overinspaincreatinganonlinecollaborativedatabaseofsounds/), [here](https://creativecommons.org/2005/10/01/freesound/), [here](https://creativecommons.org/2006/07/08/freesoundviaccmixter20kfreesounds/), [here](https://creativecommons.org/2007/01/17/freesound-sample-in-children-of-men/), [here](https://creativecommons.org/2008/03/13/freesound-20/), [here](https://creativecommons.org/2008/09/29/freesoundorg/) and [here](https://creativecommons.org/2011/09/12/celebrating-freesound-2-0-retiring-sampling-licenses/). Also you'll find plenty of information about Freesound, statistics and the like in the [Freesound Blog](https://blog.freesound.org).
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The audio content hosted in Freesound has a second life outside the website. It is very hard to track all the projects in which Freesound content is used, but with 50k unique visits per day, the accumulated millions and millions of download records and the integration with 3rd party applications, it becomes clear that **Freesound is spreading Creative Commons audio virtually everywhere**. Some users choose to use the Freesound forums to [explain the work they do using Freesound sounds](https://freesound.org/forum/your-work-made-with-freesounds/), including music, videogames, animations, movies, theater plays, education, etc. Unfortunately this is just a small minority of users. To try to keep track of some of the applications, research proejcts and other initiatives that use Freesound content, the [Freesound Labs](https://labs.freesound.org) platform was introduced back in 2015. Currently it lists more than 40 projects and over 50 research papers using Freesound data. Some of these projects include **CTAG's Strämpler**, an eurorack sample streaming and sound synthesis module; **Spotify's Sountrap**, an online DAW with direct integration of Freesound search; **Le Sound's AudioTexture**, a granular synthetizer that transforms Freesound clips; and **Freesound Explorer**, a visual interface for exploring Freesound in a 2-dimensional space and create music at the same time.
<ahref="https://www.creative-technologies.de/ctag-strampler-a-eurorack-sample-streaming-and-sound-synthesis-module/">Strämpler</a> (see <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmj8tKPHV8g">video here</a>)</p>
Both the Freesound website and API run on a modern technology stack which was built with high load and scalability in mind. Below is a diagram with the main blocks of the architecture. The main website consists of a [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com) application and HTML/CSS/JS frontend connected to a [PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org) database. This implements sound browsing and basic social interaction features (forum, sound comments, sound ratings, private messaging, etc.). Text indexing is supported by an Apache [Solr](https://lucene.apache.org/solr/) server including text descriptions and tags, which allows for sophisticated sound text queries using the Solr query syntax. A distributed architecture is used for processing incoming sounds, producing compressed previews and waveform/spectrogram images (using Python's [Pillow](https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) package), as well as for audio feature extraction. Feature extraction and the similarity search service are supported with the abovementioned Essentia library. Finally, Freesound uses [NGINX](https://www.nginx.com) webserver to serve the Django app and static content in the appservers, and [HAProxy](http://www.haproxy.org) loadbalancers to balance the load of incoming requests across the appservers.
The code of the Freesound website is **open source**, and all development happens in our [public source code repository](https://github.com/mtg/freesound/). External contributions are welcome so if you want to participate don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Of course if you're not interested in devleopment but still want to contribute to Freesound you can upload sounds or [consider making a donation](https://freesound.org/donations/donate/) :)
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