I’ve been a member of SoundCloud for over two years, but I’ve never really gotten into groups. The first group I joined was a showcase group for a college composition class. The group allowed us to show off a little and get a feel for what everybody else was doing, but lacked in a real-time element because it was meant for posting the final project after-the-fact. My final project is still in the group and it gets a little attention every month as each new class comes through, but nobody wants to comment because they don’t really know me. When SoundCloud teamed with the Smithsonian, the experience changed my outlook on participating in groups.

I got an email from SoundCloud in which I discovered the Smithsonian was running a remix contest on sounds in their archives, including Recordings of frogs and insects from Encyclopedia of Life, Astrophysical Observatory sounds, Smithsonian Jazz masterworks, and Smithsonian Folkways. I found the contest intriguing, after listening to all of the .wav files from the collections. The results of the contest are not out yet, but that doesn’t matter because I had such a blast participating in this contest. To date, I would say this is one of the better musical experiences in my life. I’m still listening to the 282 submissions and the people I’ve met in the Smithsonian remix contest group are great! I hope SoundCloud and the Smithsonian do something like this again. This was truly a great experience and I hope that you have a chance to catch it if it comes around again.