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May 30, 2007

Sounds in Google Earth


As promised, Wild Sanctuary has released a layer for Google Earth with more than 30 sounds collected from all over the world.

You can hear the sounds of the Kenyan savannah, a sudden rain in the forest, a mysterious spring chorus of loons and peepers, the bells of Notre Dame de Paris. My favorite is a soundscape from Hawaii, "an aural voyage beginning at a beach along the Maui coast, and descending below the surface into the depths of the sea, before emerging to the shore, once again. The sea pulsates with biological sound."

The layer can also be displayed in Google Maps, where the sounds are played using an embedded audio player.

2 comments:

  1. Terribly disappointed; that is how I feel to find out that the ONLY and I mean ONLY Canadian aural point is in Southern Ontario. That's right, the Central Canada urban corridor. Like some 3rd world banana-republic; one big giant massive urban monstrosity (ie, Toronto and a 400 km radius), surrounded by millions of hectares of resource-extraction hinterland.

    Meanwhile the aural points in the United States are spread right across the country. Not concentrated around New York City, the American point locations are all over, and thousands of miles away from the "urban core" of New York.

    Not so in Canada.

    As with thousands and thousands of other examples, the only Canadian sound is in Algonquin Park, just a few hours north of Toronto, a hundred kilometres or so north of Ottawa.

    Why?

    Well it is no coincidence that Google Canada's headquarters is in (you guessed it) ... Toronto!!

    What are we, some banana-republic? Some Third World Nation? Google has so little imagination (or so much fear of the unknown) that, despite a nation of 9 million square kilometres, when it goes to load the 1 and only Google Earth sound, it picks one just barely a couple hours drive from the country's biggest city??

    It's bad enough that all Canada's car factories are clustered within a few hours drive of Toronto, that all 5 major banks are headquartered in Toronto, that "Hollywood North" is now in Toronto, that the world-famous Blackberry is made just 58 minutes west of Toronto, that NASA's Canadarm is made just outside Toronto, that all major American companies are forced to locate their Canadian head offices in metro Toronto ...

    ... now we find that the only instance of a Google map aural point is also just outside Toronto?!

    I'm disgusted.

    ReplyDelete
  2. can we acsess music from google e.g google sound? that would be really useful and would be very popular with music fans.

    ReplyDelete

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