The other night I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho for the first time. Within the first few seconds of the movie I sat up in my chair. The opening music was awesome and I realized I knew the music because I started humming along. Even though I knew the music, I also knew I had never actually heard the song before. But how?

I had probably encountered bits and phrases from the film score through television, parody, and advertising; but, I knew the opening music of the movie specifically through Busta Rhyme’s sampling of it in Gimme Some More. The other night was the first time I had heard the origin’s or even realized it had an origin, in Bernard Herrmann’s opening prelude.

This scenario has happened over 500 times. I hear a song, I know I’ve never heard the song before, I know how it goes though, I figure out who sampled it, and I start comparing the two versions in my mind. While I was watching the intro to Psycho my mind was playing bits and pieces from the outrageous Busta Rhymes music video. I was also expecting an enthusiastic and fast rap to emerge. I am pretty sure this was not what Hitchcock intended when he was making the film.

I call this the Sampling Effect and it happens a lot as a result of the sampling sensibility in Hip Hop. Here’s a hypothetical situation to further illustrate the point. Say a song is sampled—maybe Timbaland samples some piano riff from a classic oldie. There will be some people, like from Timbaland’s graduating class, who will get the reference immediately. There will be other people who will learn about the reference—maybe a disc jockey introduces the Timbaland track and gives a little background on it before it begins playing.

There will be other people who do not fit into either category, they turned on the radio during the song, they never have heard the DJ introduce it. These are people who, for whatever reason, slip through the cracks. They never get the reference and never learn the reference. When they listen to the song, or look at the artwork, or building, they experience it in a different way.

The Free Sound Project functions as an online repository of sounds licensed under the curious and lesser known Creative Commons Sampling Plus! License. There is a good mixture of both straight field recordings and processed sounds. Under the terms of the sampling license, there are also multiple versions of many of the files which different members of The Project have tweaked and offered back up.

At the time of this post the site currently has 53557 audio files. That’s a lot. There are a couple of different ways to sift through all of that information: different searches for people on the look out (hear out?) for specific sounds and automatically generated lists like “Most popular files” and “Highest rated sounds” for general browsing.

I’ve always had this picture in my mind when it comes to places that have vast quantities of information and material like Free Sound. I envision most of the available good content lying dormant and collecting dust. Sure, new content is always featured in a ‘newly uploaded’ list. Sure, high ranking content is featured in a ‘high ranking’ list. What about the other stuff that hasn’t made those lists? Who has the time to go through every page of an archive of this size?

Fine, maybe all 53557 audio files of Free Sound do not need to be utilized at every minute of every day. Maybe the site serves its purpose and that’s it. More on that later.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the “random sample” link on the lower left side of the main page of The Free Sound Project. This link is a nice feature and allows for a slight churn of content.

Project Idea: Click that “random sample” link and make something out of what you find. Beware, it may be some birds chirping, chant music, or someone’s grandfather snoring.