Searching for Sound

Searching for text is soooo 1996. (Well, yes, it's vital and useful, too, but stay with me. I'm trying to do a humorously elitist and ironic intro here.) There's more to search online than just—words, for crying out loud! There's audio, too.

Search engines do not index complete audio files. That is to say, you can't expect Google to have indexed an MP3 that contains all the words to a Tina Turner song. When you search for a sound, you have to use a little savvy.

How you search depends on what you're looking for, and what you're looking for might be a sound effect or a quote from a TV show. Except for songs, I find that most of the sounds that are online are in WAV format.

If you're looking for sound effects or certain types of sound, your search can be fairly straightforward—try searching for the keyword and the keyword “wav.” The other day I was looking for windchime sounds. I got plenty of results just searching for windchimes wav. Then I thought about potential spelling issues and changed my search to (windchimes | "wind chimes") wav, which gave me over 1,200 results, the front page of which looked very relevant. A search for chimes.wav led to disaster; chimes.wav is a Windows sound file, so references to that were everywhere.

Sometimes you won't find what you want with such a specific search. In that case you need to back up and get more general. For example, say you're looking for the cry of a red-tailed hawk. Now, if you actually search for "red-tailed hawk" wav you'll get plenty of sound files, but let's pretend that didn't work, or that you weren't able to find a file you like. In that case you could back up your search using the Principle of Onions.

There are several ways to back it up. You could get a little less specific with the query hawk wav. You could get very general with bird wav. You could try plurals, with the query bird wavs.

With some sound searches, like quotes, it's a little more difficult. I recommend that when you search for a quote, you pick a little tiny part of a specific quote and try searching for that. For example, say you're looking for a wav of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 quote, “We've got movie sign!” Don't try to search for the whole thing. Instead, pick a little part of the quote—as small as you can get it so it's still unique—and search for that and the string wav. So for this search we could try "got movie sign" wav and find several dozen relevant results.

Of course, you can go beyond general Web searching to find sounds. In fact, some general search engines have audio search options, and there are a huge number of specific search engines and directories that deal with just sound. Let's start with the sound search offerings from AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and Lycos.

Regular Search Engines Offering Sound Search

I know, nobody goes to AltaVista anymore. But go anyway because they've got a decent audio search at http://www.altavista.com/audio/default. This interface searches for MP3 files, WAV files, RealAudio, Windows Media, AIFF, and “other.”

I did a quick search for “Mississippi Mass Choir” and got 11 results. Results include the title of the clip (sometimes these are helpful, like the title of the song, and sometimes they're something nonhelpful, like “Track 10”), the clip's “author” (sometimes this is available and sometimes not), length of the clip, page URL, and the option to get more media information from that page. Be sure to check out the search options below the query box, which let you narrow your search by kinds of media (MP3, WAV, Windows Media, Real, Other) and checkboxes to toggle whether the sound should be more or less than a minute.

AlltheWeb allows you to do MP3 searching at http://www.alltheweb.com/?cat=mp3 . Information in the search results includes the size of the download and the date of the file.

I must say I don't visit Lycos much any more, but their multimedia site (http://multimedia.lycos.com/) has a lot to offer. There are search options for both audio and MP3. A search for “rock” found tens of thousands of results, with the results listings including a snippet from the page (not very useful in the ones I found), file name, file size, URL, and a direct link to play the file.

Sound search engines run by general search engines are good to use when you're searching for general titles and popular stuff, or when you want the ease of using an interface with which you're already familiar. But don't stop here. There are some great sound search engines that stand alone.

Sound Search Engines and Directories

Before I get into the listings, let me say that I could literally write a book on finding sound/audio on the Web. I'm just scraping the surface here.

FindSounds—http://www.findsounds.com/

I love easy-to-understand domain names. FindSounds features a checkbox-heavy interface for finding audio online. File formats include AIFF, AU, and WAV. You can specify that sounds found be mono or stereo, their minimum resolution (8-bit or 16-bit), their minimum sample rate, and their maximum file size (which only goes up to 2MB, so this is not the place to find songs or extensive recordings).

A search for “click” found over 100 results. Results include the full URL of the sound, the name of the sound (some of them were just named “click,” but some of them were named “mouse click,” etc.), information about the sound, and links to view the entire page or to e-mail the sound. This site isn't fancy but it's fast-loading; nicely done.

Wav Central—http://www.wavcentral.com/

As you might expect from the name of the site, Wav Central indexes only WAVs. It's set up as a tabbed site—look across the top of the page for navigation.

Here you'll find WAVs divided up into several categories, including TV, FX, and commercials. Some of the sounds are mixed together—I found an MST3K WAV listed under FX. Listings include title, a brief description, date added, number of times the item has been downloaded, size, and user rating (you can use a pulldown menu to rate the WAVs you download). The Search tab allows you to search by keyword, with result listings that look like what you see when you browse. Note that the search engine automatically stems—if you search for “crow” you'll get results that include “crowd.”

SoundAmerica—http://www.soundamerica.com/

Instead of being tabbed like Wav Central, SoundAmerica is set up like a file directory. From the front page you can explore a variety of categories including cartoons, spoofs, movies, and sound effects. (All the categories I looked at had extensive subcategories.) Listings look just like directory listings—that is, you'll see the name of the file, the date it was last modified, and its size. Unfortunately there are no descriptions, which makes it hard to follow what some of these files are.

Naturesongs—http://www.naturesongs.com/

Getting away a moment from the eight hundred billion South Park WAV depositories out there, we have Naturesongs. This site offers categories like bird sounds, animal sounds, insect sounds, and even a few human sounds. Some of the categories have subcategories, and some of them don't.

Unlike the fairly plain listings on the directories we've looked at so far, these sound listings actually feature commentary. The site's writer explains what you're hearing, where the sound was recorded, and provides the size of the recording. Not only will you get to hear some cool nature sounds, you'll learn something too!

Ljudo—http://ljudo.com/

Not a helpful domain name, is it? Ljudo is a directory of over 1,200 sound effects in MP3 and RealAudio formats. Ljudo is different from many of the resources I've covered here in that it's available in several different languages.

Once you've picked the correct language and entered the front of the site, you'll get a search box. Enter a keyword—I tried “bell”—and you'll get a list of results. Results include filename, file size, and the option to hear it in either MP3 or RealAudio format. There's no annotation to the file names but they're usually self-explanatory. I like this site because the results load quickly and it's focused on one thing: sound effects.

Speechbot—http://speechbot.research.compaq.com/

From this site you can search over 17,000 hours of content from a variety of Web sites. There are a couple ways you can access the content on this site. You can do a simple keyword search, which can (but doesn't have to) include topic restrictions (advice, sport, paranormal, etc.). You can also do a power search, which allows you to restrict by media type and by date, and to do a little Boolean tweaking.

A search for “Tom Peters” found 22 results. Results include a link to play the extract, the Web site, date, and an extract from the transcript. The extracts are rather short and range from very helpful to not helpful at all. Fortunately there's a “Show Me More” link for more extensive transcripts. If you're doing current event research, or looking for topical audio, look here first.

The Earchives—http://www.the-earchives.com/

The Earchives is a WAV depository that allows some extensive searching options. You can search by actor, character, title, or WAV description. You can also browse, getting the top 150 downloads, random WAVs, and a list of wanted WAVs. You can also, heaven help you, browse the sound files in alphabetical order.

A search for “Daffy” by character found 15 results. Results show the title of where it comes from (in this case Warner Brothers Cartoons), the date added, the character and actor, and a description of the file that shows a transcript, the length of the file, a link to download it, and the number of times it's been downloaded.

Other Fun Audio Sites

The Daily WAV—http://www.dailywav.com/

Heh! If you're looking for clever, quippy WAVs to use to signal incoming mail or whatever, this is where to look. This site features a new WAV every day (well, the weekends are doubled up) with a variety of sayings from a variety of pop culture celebrities. Selections include Mr. T., Star Trek, Darkwing Duck, and Mr. Rogers.

You can view archives chronologically (back to January 1999) or alphabetically (the clips are listed by show/movie/whatever name). The archives aren't quite complete (looks like the Webmaster got hit by a C&D from The Simpsons people—there are no Simpsons WAVs on this site), but you'll find yourself browsing for hours.

Historical Sounds Archive—http://www.webcorp.com/sounds/

I don't know who these folks are, but they've got a nice mix of audio and video at their site. You'll find a lot of sound bites from Nixon, but there are several other historical figures here, too, including Winston Churchill, Malcolm X, and Bill Clinton. Materials here are in RealAudio and WAV format. There's also some video in AVI format as well.

Interactive TTS Demo—http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html

Sometimes you can't find a WAV that says quite what you want it to say. That's when you can use this experimental text-to-speech (TTS) generator. Why search endlessly for a clip of a Monty Python Gumby saying “My brain hurts!” when you can create your own?

What you do is enter the text you want spoken into the query box, then you choose the type of voice you want the words spoken in from a pulldown menu (choose from U.S. English, U.K. English, French, German, or Spanish). The site generates a WAV that you save to your local machine. I found pronunciation to be fairly straightforward; if you want a silly-sounding WAV, you'll have to do some phonetic experimentation (“my brayyn hurtz!”).