The theme for LIBR559M this week is “Creation and the Social Web” so I thought I would use my blog post to highlight a particularly interesting bit of social media called SoundCloud. Soundcloud is a music sharing service with a difference. It is not so much designed to store your music collection as it is a place for people who want to gauge reactions about original audio that they have created or even share that audio for remixing.

SoundCloud encourage anyone posting original material to do so under a Creative Commons license, so there is a lot of music on SoundCloud that is free to be downloaded, edited, remixed and posted on the site again. I think the most ingenious aspect of the site is the presentation of the audio track as a soundwave across your screen. This gives the audio a visual representation without obscuring the aural representation with video (like on YouTube). This visual also allows people to make comments at the exact moment of the recording that is relevant. Sometimes the comment stream that develops, in a way, also becomes part of the manifestation of the work (as it appears on SoundCloud). A good example of this is here.

In this respect SoundCloud is similar to the service highlighted by @giustini in our learning module called VoiceThread. Voicethread allows people to record audio while contributing to discussions about slide show presentations. When you view a slide, the discussion plays in the order of whoever posted first. I really liked VoiceThread but I found this format to be a very time consuming way to view a powerpoint presentation. Attention spans being what they are these days I not sure how effective it might prove for general public use.

I first heard of SoundCloud when listening to one of my favourite NPR podcasts All Songs Considered. Along with email, blog comments and twitter they also encourage listeners to go their SoundCloud page where you can make text comments along the visual soundwave of the program. Alternatively, you can record your comments and submit them to their SoundCloud Dropbox.

Surprisingly, I was only able to find one library that is making use of SoundCloud, the Mooresville Public Library in Indiana. They have posted a series of piano recordings all by the same artist under a declared mandate of extending “the library’s mission to providing sound recordings to the public.”

While simply sharing music is one way a library can use Soundcloud, I can certainly see other affordances for this kind of service. For instance, the fact that there is a lot of Creative Commons licensed music means you could use it as a tool of engagement for teens and young adults. They could listen to, comment on, remix and repost tracks without worry that the library is enabling copyright infringement.

TheNextWeb also suggests using Soundcloud to post your podcasts since they can be easily shared from Soundcloud or even embedded on other websites, just like YouTube videos. Since so much of the content is free, they also recommend to use it to find audio tracks to accompany video or slide presentations. TheNextWeb also points out that SoundCloud can search for audio according to location. So, if you want, you can compare what people are posting from different geographic areas.

Posted: 08|6|11 at 2:41 pm. Filed under: LIBR559M.
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