soundswhereas

Soundswhereas is an online audio repository and collaborative platform that allows users to upload, tag, and share short sound clips for research, education, and creative projects. Established in 2019 by a consortium of university sound engineers and open‑source software developers, the project was created to fill a gap in freely available, high‑quality acoustic datasets. The name “soundswhereas” reflects the site’s emphasis on comparative audio analysis, encouraging users to juxtapose different recordings to identify subtle acoustic variations.

The platform is built on a modular architecture that supports various file formats including WAV, FLAC, and MP3, with a focus on preserving uncompressed audio whenever storage allows. Users may annotate clips with metadata such as recording location, equipment, and intended use, which is searchable via the public web interface. Soundswhereas also integrates with the Common Voice project, offering annotations for linguistic phonetics as well as environmental sound classification.

A notable feature is the “Contrast” tool, which lets researchers layer two clips and view waveform overlays, frequency spectrograms, and pitch contours side‑by‑side, thereby facilitating comparative studies of vocalizations, musical phrases, or ecological noises. The platform’s API permits programmatic access, enabling automation of data retrieval for machine learning projects.

Because Soundswhereas operates under a Creative Commons Zero license, all uploaded content is freely reusable without attribution, subject to the platform’s terms of service. The community has grown to include academics, educators, sound designers, and hobbyists worldwide. Future updates plan to add support for binaural recordings, a media player with spatial audio rendering, and a user‑contributed tagging system to improve searchability.