While browsing through sweetcode’s archives I found an interesting link to Andrew Plotkin’s program boodler. Boodler is a soundscape generation tool written in Python. Basically it allows you to generate sounds by taking sample sounds, modifying them and playing them using independently scheduled agents. It is a pretty nifty little gadget, and comes with examples which replicate some of those “ambience” CDs like thunderstorms, crickets and frogs.

For fun, I took the one of their example effects which generates an hour long rainstorm with thunder, and generated a full hour of raw audio which I then burned on CD. I also ripped it as both an mp3 file
using lame and an ogg file using oggenc.

What’s cool about this is that you can change and tune the soundscape to your own particular likes and dislikes. One of the sounds in the rain is a screechy bug that sounds like feedback. So, get rid of it! Have some thunderclaps that you like better? Integrate them into a new version! Think the rain and thunder aren’t well balanced in volume? Fix it!

Tom Duff pointed out that there are people who take the whole “soundscape” idea seriously. The World Soundscape Project homepage lists some of the relevant history and publications of individuals that are interested in documenting and preserving the sounds of various environments.