Composing with All Sound Using the FreeSound and Wordnik APIs

Abstract

In order to create algorithmic art using the wealth of documents available on the internet, artists must discover strategies for organizing those documents. In this paper I demonstrate techniques for organizing and collaging sounds from the user-contributed database at freesound.org. Sounds can be organized in a graph structure by exploiting aural similarity relationships provided by freesound.org, and lexical relationships provided by wordnik.com. Music can then be generated from these graphs in a variety of ways. In the final section, I elaborate on three pieces I've generated from sound graphs using cellular automata, and swarm intelligence.