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Sounds Bring Google Earth to Life
posted by Satri
on Friday May 11, @08:05AM
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from the your-virtual-globe-is-talking-to-you dept.
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from the your-virtual-globe-is-talking-to-you dept.
Slashdot discusses a short BBC article about users of Google Earth may soon be able to listen to the sounds that accompany them. Their summary: "The BBC is reporting that a Californian company has created software that can layer relevant recorded sounds over locations in Google Earth. The firm, Wild Sanctuary, has thousands of hours of recordings from all over the world. Company director Dr. Krause has spent over 40 years collecting sounds from natural and man-made habitats. '... his recordings include more than 15,000 animal noises, and sounds from a huge array of habitats, including cities, deserts, mountains and the marine environment. It is the largest library in existence of natural sound, he said. He said the idea would be to zoom-in on a particular area and then have the option to listen to the accompanying sound."
Related Stories
Geopodcasting and Geotagged Sounds
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A discussion about Geopodcasting on the Geowanking mailing list pointed to geotagged sounds on Freesound. Sounds are mapped on Google Map. From the discussion: "Imagine if there were geopodcasts. That is, bits of audio ABOUT a
place annotated with the location OF the place. Then, when you asked
Google for trip directions, it would also give you an RSS feed of URLs
pointing to geopodcasts along the route of your trip. Then you could
suck them down to your laptop. Using a GPS receiver and the
appropriate software, it would play the audio file, timing it so that
the file stopped playing when you got to the place described."
More Geocoded Sounds with SoundTransit 2 comments
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Very Spatial introduces SoundTransit, a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. This is similar to the Freesound geotagged sounds project previously covered here. From the SoundTransit website: "On this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world, or you can search the database for specific sounds by different artists from certain places. [...] The Creative Commons Attribution license encourages the sharing and reuse of all sounds on this website."
Application Domains: Listening to Maps
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The Cartography blog as an interesting entry about sound maps for the visually impaired. From the blog: "There are multimedia maps that include sounds [...]. Then there are maps that rely on sound to convey the data, meant for use by the visually impaired." From one of the links provided: "A research project (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/audiomap) at the University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) investigated interactive sonification (user-controlled data-driven non-speech sound) to present the geographical distribution pattern of statistical data. In addition to helping blind users, this will benefit low-vision and sighted users in visually overloaded situations. The immediate goal is improving access to geo-referenced data. In a larger context, this will improve citizen access to government statistics for queries, problem solving, and decision making."
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