The UK Museum of Ordure, in association with low-fi, has launched an audio library to collect, archive, manipulate and distribute sound samples collected from the public about various relevant topics.

The Audio Library system consists of four independant software processes. The Recording Engine, written in Objective-C using Cocoa and CoreAudio APIs, continuously listens for audio activity on a microphone. When sound above a certain threshold is registered, audio files are logged to disk, splitting the recordings into manageable chunks that can be stored in XML Property Lists. The Playback Engine, also developed in Objective-C, resequences these files in realtime to form new statements, and outputs these to six independant audio channels. Two further utilities (one a curatorial process written in Perl, the other a Foundation based conversion utility) cooperate in preparing selected extracts from each day's archive, creating WAV files and uploading them to the UKMO server for public presentation.

For more information, please visit the UKMO Audio Library