here via ladyada's ranting."Loops, Grooves, Licks, Stings, Hits, Pads, Melodic Motives/Themes/Phrases, Sound-Effects, City and Country Soundscapes, Motors, Machines, Toys, Guns, Explosions, Swords, Armor, Cars, Jets, Pot & Pans, Acoustic and Synthetic Noises, Acoustic and Electronic Drums, Voices, Western and World Instruments, Real and Human Animals, Industrial and Natural Ambiences, Film and Game Foley, and more, more, more! This huge collection of new and original samples have been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger @ cSounds.com specifically to support the OLPC developers, students, XO users, and computer and electronic musicians everywhere. They are FREE and are offered under a CC-BY license for downloading and use in your teaching, your demos, your research, your music, your remixes, your songs, your games, your videos, your slideshows, your websites, and your XO activities. Each of the 7000+ samples is 16-bit, WAV, Mono, normalized to -3dB, and provided at 3 sample rates - 44.1K, 22.5K and 16K."
Oh great. That'll cure hunger, disease, ignorance and oppression in the third world. I hate this stupid project. The third world needs human-to-human education and methods for nurturing sustainable economic growth for all. "Technology" of this sort is most definitely not the solution. Free samples do NOT raise the basic level of human dignity for those in need. It really makes me sick seeing malnourished, illiterate kids with mobile phones (I am speaking from personal experience). As an MIT alum, I have always had mixed feelings about this project, but free samples is a perfect example of how NOT to go about helping the third world.
ReplyDeleteDude, it's just a sample library.
ReplyDeleteThough criticism of the OLPC philosophy is certainly warranted, the overwhelming majority of the sounds in this collection existed long before they were rolled up into one general purpose creative commons sample library that just happens to carry the OLPC name. Would you feel differently if some other organization had released the exact same library?
I guess I should point out that perhaps I'm a bit biased having personally donated sounds. :)
One Loop Per Child!
ReplyDelete@thumbuki:
ReplyDeleteI'm all for a free, creative commons sample repository, and it's great that you and many others contributed to such a resource. So, yes, I would feel completely different about it if it were not associated with OLPC. However, as can be seen from the title of the post, it is just too easy to make it sound like every little OLPC-related activity is some kind of charitable event. As you yourself say: "Dude, it's just a sample library". Claiming that this is somehow useful for "The Children of the World" is what makes me angry, because it smacks of cynical, first-world complacency.