Dear All,

We were impressed to receive such a wide variety of submissions from you for our #WhatIfSoundSamples call for entries. As promised, we’re each picking our three favourites choosing from three different categories: sound samples, mini-pieces, and our “extra” sounds.

A) Sound Samples
This category encompasses the entries which are closest to what we asked for: short, specific sounds that can easily be used in a remix or for sound design.

My personal choice is Jan Longerich’s submission “Reversed Kontrabass”. It is actually a simple acoustic instrument recording, but because it is reversed, it turned into an electronic sound.

Barbara loves RandomDude’s “Jaw Harp”, the roughness of the sounds that is paired with overtones and melodic fragments.

Barbara’s choice is “What if? Free Sound Sample” by Denim Szram. She likes the just-about-contained explosiveness of the material.

Barbara has selected Magic Sun’s “Soundscape 1” for its long phrasing and meditative sphere.

We’ll be talking to all these community members in upcoming blog posts and hope to share more about what motivates them to make sounds and music. In the meantime, your next step if you’d like to participate more actively in our community is to use these sounds to create your own remixes. With this in mind, we are participating this year in February Album Writing Month (FAWM).

This is a community where you write 14 tracks in 28 days, with a lot of forum discussion and mutual feedback. This is the perfect opportunity for you to use some of these fantastic sound samples. Feel free to use anything from our SoundCloud account, as long as you credit the author and link back to us.

Make an account and participate with us! We’ll be cheering each other on. You can follow What if?’s own Mad Maddy (our badass feminist coder lady) here.

Thank you again for your contributions and congratulations,

Clio and Barbara