FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2022

The BBC Sound Effect Archive offers over 33,000 sound effects and audio recording to the world, free to listen, download and reuse for non-commercial purposes. These include sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, recordings from the Blitz in London, special effects made for BBC TV and Radio productions, as well as 15,000 recordings of creatures and landscapes from the Natural History Unit archive.

You can explore sounds from every continent - from the college bells ringing in Oxford to a Patagonian waterfall - or listen to a submarine klaxon or the sound of a 1969 Ford Cortina door slamming shut. The earliest item in the collection is probably the world’s earliest natural history sound recording – made onto wax cylinder in 1889 by a 9 year old Ludwig Koch.

As well as browsing and searching through this treasure trove of sounds, you can also make and share mixes and soundscapes using the ‘mixer mode’ function, layering, editing and re-ordering clips from the archive.

This archive, originally maintained for BBC producers to use in programming, has proved hugely popular since launch, getting millions of page views each year from students, teachers, podcasters, artists, musicians, theatre groups and film makers. The sounds have also been used in various therapeutic contexts, and have inspired a number of academic research projects, using machine learning to interrogate and analyse the dataset.

This free-to-access ‘shop window’ also provides a user journey for commercial and professional users, generating income for the BBC.

This talk - peppered with lots of audio effects - will cover the history of the collection,  the creation of the website and the various novel and unexpected uses of the content that have emerged since launch.