Leveraging Online Audio Commons Content for Media Production

Abstract

With the advent of online audio resources and web technologies, digital tools for sound designers and music producers are changing. The Internet provides access to hundreds of thousands of digital audio files, from humanand nature-related environmental sounds, instrument samples and sound effects, to produced songs ready to use in media production. In relation to the vast amount of creative content available online, an emerging community has forged a culture of sharing. Creative Commons (CC) appears as a legal framework to support such initiative enabling the reuse and remix of creative artefacts. In this chapter, we discuss key concepts and challenges related to the use of CC online audio content (Audio Commons content) for linear media production. We present five use cases connected to the Audio Commons Initiative, illustrating how the gap between audio content creators, digital content providers, sound designers and music producers can be bridged using a web infrastructure and user-friendly tools. The use cases cover various creative production workflows from composition to performance. This chapter discusses novel tools enabling users to “surf” the web in search of sounds matching a creative brief, to import and process CC-licensed audio in the DAW, or to play live performances with laptop ensembles making use of responsive web audio technologies.