What happens when you combine 1 building, 40,000 LEDs, a couple of electronica tunes, and 4 programmers/composers? An entire building can come to life, and dance to the rhythm while accenting the melodies. Front and foreground, standing in the limelight is the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. The project was developed using a mix of Ableton Live, Max/MSP, PureData, and OSC. Thankfully, the members involved had the foresight to record the performance, and the museum can replay the audio w/ the visuals at any time. (audio starts around 20 seconds)

Source: Create Digital Motion

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.