The best part of digging through massive digital archives is serendipity. Going in blind, throwing search terms at algorithms and seeing how far down the rabbit hole you can go. A platform like Europeana is perfect for that. It holds about 55 million digital objects from all over Europe; you can spend ages browsing it. For this sample pack that’s exactly what we did. We just started digging and downloading any openly licensed item we could find, latching onto certain themes but equally exploring random finds because who knew if we could find them again.
This sample pack, as the title suggests features lots of xylophone field recordings from Madagascar, sitar ragas, field recordings of the Dutch city, Haarlem, plus some glorious bagpipes, sea shanties and choirs.
There’s something for everyone in here and we hope you have fun exploring it just like we had fun collecting it.
Want to explore yourself? Check out www.europeana.eu!
Download the Sample Pack here.
All sounds are listed as Public Domain except for the Haarlem field recordings which are licensed under CC BY-SA by the_riel_thing
Image: page 155 of ”Alter Ejusdem’: being another instalment of lilts and lyrics. By the author of ‘Mistura curiosa via British Library