Hi freesounders,
We are happy to announce that we have just released a new feature for organising sounds in Freesound. Following recent research at the MTG, we reached to the definition of a sound taxonomy named “Broad Sound Taxonomy” (BST). That was informed from a user experiment which was carried out some months ago, and in which was open to all Freesound users. Now we finally introduce the BST in Freesound as an additional tool to improve sound searching and browsing. The Broad Sound Taxonomy is designed to be simple and easy to use, and consists of 5 categories and 24 subcategories. Below is a figure showing the structure of the BST. More information about the taxonomy can be found in the BST section of the help page.
From now on, when uploading sounds you’ll have to select one of the categories and subcategories of BST. In the search page, you’ll see BST categories and subcategories as filtering facets. Sounds that are not annotated (such as those uploaded before the release of the feature) will be automatically assigned a category by an algorithm. Also, you’ll see information about the category of a sound in the sound page. If the category was added by an algorithm and not by the sound uploader, this will be indicated. But algorithms do fail sometimes, so such categories can be edited by uploaders. Feel free to edit your uploaded sounds and assign categories yourself! Here there are some screenshots of the new feature:
Example of a sound page indicating the BST category and subcategory
Another example of a sound page, in that case the category and subcategory have been assigned by an algorithm (note the robot icon)
Because of these changes, we are reindexing all sounds in the search engine, so you will see some sounds missing until the process is complete in the next couple of hours.
We hope you enjoy the new feature in your future searches:)
penny
on behalf of the Freesound team