of May 2026, 19:58
Back in 2025, Freesound turned 20 years old. As part of their celebrations, they had a call for a composition competition around the theme of Intangible Heritage, using only sounds from the Freesound archive. My submission "1972" for this call was awarded 2nd place and was premiered at the award ceremony on October 28th, 2025 at Sala Aranyó, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. In the future, I will write a proper article on the concept behind and making of this piece.
In conjunction to the competition, Freesound released all submissions to the Freesound 20th Anniversary Composition Contest that agreed to participate in the release. The release is entirely free and can be found here. A total of 26 pieces are included in this release, both awarded and others. The official release announcement can be read here.
In other news, I recently decided to add a little piece of Max/MSP helper code for sigmoid-type parameter mappings. It is an abstraction that I often find helpful, particularly in algorithmic composition situations, where stochastic processes need to be shaped around a value, for example. Of course, the text for the download page of the abstractions had to get completely out of hand and ballooned to article-like proportions.
Moreover, I tried my hand at articles with interactive elements for illustrative purposes. I made my own graphing element that works nicely as a Django widget and is rendered locally using jQuery and the canvas. It can overlay any number of functions, make them toggleable and generate as many sliders for parameters as needed. On mouse over (or touch-and-hold on touch device), it shows the input value (x-axis) and all corresponding output values (y-axis) for each displayed curve. It feels very smooth, flexible and I think it fits nicely into my website's visual design language. Have a look at the article here, if not for the content of the article, then at least for a go at the widgets and some serious fun with sigmoids!