Library of Congress plans to release over 100 years of free-to-use music samples
Written by Site Hub on May 18, 2020
Some time this summer, The United States Library of Congress will launch a new tool that provides free-to-use, public domain audio samples from over 100 years of music that have been saved in its archives. The samples will include hip-hop ones that artists haven’t been able to previously access at all or with ease.
Brian Foo, the LOC’s 2020 Innovator-in-Residence Program and an American Museum of Natural History data visualization artist, came up with the idea because he specifically wanted people to be able to create new hip-hop music based on the “collage-based” golden age of the genre. He noted that much of hip-hop’s style has been lost in modern forms because of lawsuits that have made accessing and sampling hip-hip incredibly restrictive and costly.
He hopes that the LOC’s public release will help producers and hip-hip artists “maximize their creativity, invent new sounds, and connect listeners to materials, cultures, and sonic history that might otherwise be hidden from public ears.”
An open-source tool provided through LOC called Citizen DJ will allow people to search by sound and metadata and listen to and download thousands of samples from various collections. It will also provide a music-creation feature for remixing and combining sounds with various hip-hop beats. Visitors to https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov can find a beta version of the new tool and some previews.
