CitizenDJ – Make music using free audio and video from the Library of Congress | Hacker News Reader

CitizenDJ – Make music using free audio and video from the Library of Congress

citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov

266 pointsmindcrime24 comments

Love it that they didn't only chop everything, analyzed it and offered people to download single items, but put a sequencer there as well as offering bulk downloads (basically sample packs). That you can filter by note + pitch is awesome too! Will be fun to play around with.

I'd love to have a volume slider though, because it does get a bit loud when dragging the mouse, so I don't have to turn down everything. Or even better, if every clip was also adjusted by perceived loudness (with a on/off toggle).

Edit: The following "end-of-residency retrospective" article was excellent too: https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/retro/

Creator of Citizen DJ here. I made this project almost 5 years ago during my residency at the Library of Congress. I had such a great experience, I actually work at the Library now. I am happy to answer any questions about any aspects of the project!

If you could build it in 2024 what would you do differently and what would you keep the same?

Great question! One of the big changes between 2020 and now is the popularization of generative AI. If I were to make this project now, I'd probably feel pressured to either use genAI or justify why I am not using it for the music-making aspect. Though honestly I'd probably keep it the same since being a child of the 80's and 90's I am nostalgic for samplers and sequencers.

Another big change since 2020 is the Music Modernization Act (MMA) which started to actually move (quite old) music recordings into the public domain. This adds significantly more audio to our collective crate of free sounds (I actually added a bunch more audio to Citizen DJ since my residency ended: https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/public-domain-2022/ ). Given the leaps in easier-to-use ML tooling in the past few years, I could probably do a lot more around discovery and visualization of large amounts of audio.

I agree, this is one of the rare occasions one has an abundance of samples and content to work with. No generative ai required to have a lot of fun. Good job.

This is fantastic. I've got two samplers that I've just started building a sample library for (Korg Drumlogue and Teenage Engineering's KO II) This is exactly the kind of tool that will help me find interesting sounds. Great job.

Even better, while there's plenty of music to be had, there's a lot of other stuff as well. In my case, what led me to even find this was just looking for public domain audio files I could use for testing and debugging various bits of audio processing software that I'm working with.

I'll be interested in maybe using some files for testing speech recognition and what-not as part of that. So some of the interviews and spoken word recordings will be of primary interest to me.

That said, I'm sure there's some interesting music mixed in here as well and I'm looking forward to exploring that. :-)

This is fantastic.

My only qualm is in "browse" mode, I wish the clips were slightly longer. Or that holding down the mouse/trackpad kept playing the clip. As of now, and unless I'm doing it wrong, the clips are so short you only get the vaguest sense of their content.

That aside, really great work.

> My only qualm is in "browse" mode, I wish the clips were slightly longer. Or that holding down the mouse/trackpad kept playing the clip. As of now, and unless I'm doing it wrong, the clips are so short you only get the vaguest sense of their content.

Their processing splits out individual sounds from longer clips, so the purpose is to browse those clips, not the full songs/recordings. Works quite well when you're hunting for things to use as samples in music production.

But regardless of that, once you've selected a clip, you can click "Play in context" to playback the sound together with what's before and after. And for the full song/recording, you can press "View on loc.gov" to play the entire thing.

This is very, very cool. I’ve always wanted to use federal recordings, and this makes it really easy. I wonder how developed the filters are.

https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/loc-variety-stage/remix/?b=8...

This is a very cool tool. Remind's me of Peez's beats from Very Bad Wizards.

Excellent!

Is there an explanation of how the 4 samples are chosen in remix mode and is there a way to change them individually?

Creator here. In general, the samples are automatically selected using a mix of onset detection and audio analysis, giving preference to clips that have a clear musical pitch. I give a brief explanation here: https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/about/#how-do-you-selectcrea... . The sequencer randomly selects 4 of those samples that are sequential in the source audio. You can change them individually by clicking on the track settings button (the mixer icon).

Thanks

my little brother made this over 20 years ago: http://poudoum.free.fr/Stupid.mp3

so cool congrats

Is building this a reasonable expenditure of tax dollars?

> Proposed budgets should not exceed $90,000 for the first year and $90,000 for the optional second year. The Labs team seeks proposals for research and work that connects Library collections to new audiences by promoting insight and inspiration, discovery of Library items, and/or creative remixing and reuse. [1]

Speaking as a taxpayer, that seems like a pretty minimal investment (certainly on the government scale) with a novel, beneficial goal.

[1]: https://labs.loc.gov/about/opportunities/innovator-in-reside...

It’s less than one minute of nuclear arsenal maintenance. We can afford both.

https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2024/06/17/us-sp...

Yes. It has my vote.

I might remove the "Jews" filter that's weird

I have not downloaded....

What sounds are under the jew category?

Seems the filters are automatically taken from the Library of Congress items themselves, and in the case of "Jews", there is only a single item that matches that filter: https://www.loc.gov/item/00694076/ ("Cohen on his honeymoon")

There is a bunch of other filters that doesn't make much sense is a musical context, like "facial expressions" or "dough" but again, those come from the Library of Congress, not from CitizenDJ, it seems at least.

Creator here. Yes, I confirm that those terms are taken directly from the Library's subject headings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Subject_He... . And yes, the Library's subject headings, and really the broader practice of describing cultural/historical materials, are sometimes problematic and constantly evolving.

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