Web Tips: Sounds of Nature, Random Locations, AI Houses

Back to nature

earth.fm

The places where you can really listen to untouched wilderness are becoming fewer and fewer. With his project earth.fm, the French activist Catalin Zorzini wants to make nature and its creatures heard. He himself describes it as “like Spotify, but for natural soundscapes”. A playlist can be clicked together on a zoomable world map, which can consist of “Tasmania’s Ancient Rainforest”, “Storm in the High Atlas Mountains” and dozens of other, mostly three-minute pieces.

Because Zorzini and his team manage to win over excellent audio professionals for earth.fm, the pieces impress with their high quality and surprising sounds. If you click on “learn more” for a piece, additional information about the recording situation appears, sometimes also about the animals that you can hear. In addition, the artist Merve Gençer, who is also part of the team, provides a pretty watercolor painting for most of the pieces.

So far there is only one recording from Germany, but it has it all: the sound artist Andreas Bick – who even received an Emmy Award for one of his film scores – recorded the fascinating sound of a sea ice surface bursting under water near Berlin.

Because Zorzini has set himself the goal of having new sounds online every three days, he is looking for other suppliers. As a contributor, you don’t have to worry about copyright: the right of use granted only extends to the website. earth.fm does not provide for downloading the files, only streaming. Conversely, this means that visitors should be careful not to save the sounds and publish them elsewhere without asking.

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random locations

randomstreetview.com
mapcrunch.com
random.earth

Need help procrastinating? Or are you absolutely out of ideas when it comes to the next travel destinations? Let yourself be driven around the world by a random number generator – several Google mash-ups will support you: Randomstreetview, for example, shows randomly selected street view recordings. You can land in the heart of New York, then on a dirt road in Cambodia. Conveniently, the tool shows you the Google Maps section of the location, so you can always see where chance has brought you.

The much older MapCrunch, on the other hand, only shows the place name, which is not always meaningful. For example, you can focus on a country of your choice in Street View Roulette, on downtown shots or on the rather rare indoor house tours, which the Google service also contains. If you want to broaden your horizons, you can use random.earth to beam you to randomly selected locations on Google Earth.

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Calculated houses

thispersondoesnotexist.com
thishousedoesnotexist.org

Face generators have both fascinated and terrified for some time. Websites like thispersondoesnotexist.com are based on neural networks that calculate real-looking images in a matter of seconds (see c’t 7/2019, p. 58). Based on this, the developer Peter Levels has now had the fun with thishousedoesnotexist.org of having a self-designed AI generate a random house with an often exceptionally pretty appearance every time the page is called up.

On Twitter you can level (@levelsio) as he develops the project further. Sometimes he explains how he installs a renderer that enables high-resolution image downloads. Then he adds new views, building materials or weather situations that flow into the modelling. Most recently, he presented an AI that generates text descriptions for depicted houses.

c’t issue 21/2022

(raised)