See all those lil’ green & yellow blips on the map above? Those represent various audio clips, geotagged by location and complete with details on how the sounds were recorded. A seemingly solid use of Google Maps integration by a team at Concordia University’s Electroacoustic department.

The best part? Most (if not all) of the sound clips utilize the Creative Commons license, allowing you to incorporate the sounds into your own projects (with proper attribution, of course – it’s good karma).

Straight from the source:

Sound maps are in many ways the most effective auditory archive of an environment, touching on aspects political, artistic, cultural, historical, and technological.

We are aiming to create an archival database of sound recordings from all over Montréal. The Montréal Sound Map is an ongoing and continually evolving project with the goal of a constant addition of new recordings being placed into a browsable tagging system (see road map).

Check out the map for yourself, and add some clips if you feel so inspired.

Sita Sings The BluesBy Nina Paley

Last night I sat down in front of ol’ man laptop in search of audio-visual entertainment and feasted my peepers (jeepers!) on something beautiful.  This beauty came by the name of Sita Sings The Blues.  Okay where to begin… there’s just too much cool going on here.  Everyone, breathe. Find your calm place and we are ready to begin.

Sita Sings the Blues takes us through what the poster dubs as the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.  I’m inclined to agree.  Artist, animator and director (WHAT?!) Nina Paley gives us an animated re-telling of the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu tale of love, trust, betrayal, justice and… well it covers a lot of allegorical ground.  To boil it down you have the beautiful Sita and the trials she experiences with her main squeeze Rama.

Now this on its own would make for a stellar watch (like with your eyes, not the time keeper) but the awesome keeps on coming.  First off Sita expresses her emotional state through dirty thirties era blues songs.  And through some alternating animation styles, as well as references to contemporary relationships you have here a story designed specifically to amaze.

Now I am just about to wrap this post up but there’s one last thing. IT’S ULTRA-FREE! I say ultra because this feature length film is not only offered for free download in numerous formats but it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.  This basically translates into a do-whatever-you-want-with-it license.  Share, distribute, profit-from, remix and… well anything.  Checkout the official site to read Nina Paley’s thoughtful post on her reasoning behind this choice.  This also got me learning about the Free Culture movement, but that’s for another post.