Map of forest sounds from around the world (opens in new tab)

A similar project is radio aporee, a huge corpus of field recordings from all over the world (see the "maps" section for searching etc): https://aporee.org/

No recordings yet in my area, was looking how to contribute: audio seems licensed under creative commons so it's not locked in (nice), submission process sounds straightforward (nice), checking out the submission flow: that requires signing in with a google account... but there is also an email address mentioned, perhaps that's an alternative path. Bit sad that the default flow just assumes you're happy with one of the biggest ad tech companies' privacy policy, especially when this project seems to have taken the effort to make a clear and succinct privacy policy of their own.

There are also the field recordings (mostly urban) from Tsonami https://www.audiomapa.org/

Worth mentioning the huge database of Freesound https://freesound.org/browse/geotags/

I spent one evening laying on the Yosemite valley floor, from dusk until well past the moon and stars had made their appearances. The entire time I was there, frogs were holding a concert. And sound echoes between the rocks.

I think timing might be an interesting factor to introduce, e.g. all forests at sunset.

Something I realized hiking the stairway to heaven is how much road traffic in a valley can be amplified by surrounding mountains. Can't be good for nature.

Something I've thought about recently is how loud forests should be. Daniel Mason names this loss explicitly in the wonderful North Woods, namely that "[b]etween 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening." Likewise, Cat Bohannon's stellar Eve notes that "[w]hen you first visit a tropical rain forest, the dominant emotion is usually surprise—not over the beauty of the place, nor over how hot it is. The biggest shock is that it's bloody loud."

Fun fact, when I went to a trip through Europe (I'm from Buenos Aires) I arrived at 6AM on a sunday. And the first thing I noticed is how different the bird sounds are.

There's also a radio interface that uses this data: https://www.tree.fm/

Real nice resource!

And if any geeks want to get involved with adding to the recordings but don’t want to invest much, I have a raspberry pi recorder project that can help. It even runs on a pi zero.

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru

As an added bonus, if what you are recording can be heard on three recorders or more you can sound localize with them. Find out where that wood pecker is pecking from for example.

Lastly. You can synchronise the time on all your computers with it as it doubles as a time server with sub-microsecond time accuracy.

(PS. Love the comments about New Zealand here, I’m from New Zealand :-) )

It's a shame most (all?) the sound recordings are so short. ~1min I would love to have like 30m or longer ones.

I'm from Western Europe but I lived a year and a half in New Zealand almost a decade ago, I miss the wilderness and the sound of the birds from this area of the world. This project is neat!

I make ambient music, and stuff like this is so nice to put in the background. Love that someone decided to collect and organize these.

I love this. Sometimes we humans are so batshit crazy trying to build that next-big-mega-thing... and here we have an easy-to-use map of forest sounds, and it just works. Kudos!