Sound in Social

Thanks to sites such as Tumblr and YouTube, visual content is dominating the current online social scene and sound has somewhat taken a back seat. However, thanks to the rise of sites such as SoundCloud, 2012 should be the year that sound roars back into social.

With this in mind here are five links that demonstrate how sound is evolving on new and existing social platforms.

Blaving calls itself ‘the voice social network’ and basically allows users to create podcasts and share them across various social networks. What makes this site interesting however is that it suggests that you actually record the sounds that surround you during the day such as a saucepan sizzling or music you’re hearing. Blaving also allows you to push your updates across other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Thinglink is an innovative site that lets you tag sound, links and videos to images online. Having the ability to tag audio to images could massively change the way that people share and experience online images.

QWiPS further develops the idea of changing the way that people consume images. This app allows you to add a short clip of sound to the online content that you’re interacting with, and then further push it out to social networking sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. QWiPS also comes with a selection of effects such as reverb, chorus and delay to allow users to generate more unique sound clips with ease.

You can’t really write about sound in social without mentioning Spotify. Over the past year the site’s userbase has ballooned, and awareness of the software has increased massively. This is mainly thanks to its integration into Facebook and the effect it has had on the ticker to the side. Spotify allows collaborative playlists and makes it easy to share music. However, it doesn’t really allow any space for user generated content. Recently Spotify also released a new feature for Facebook called ‘Listen with Friends’. This new function basically allows you to DJ for your friends online in real time.

Lastly, voice recognition and social platforms should be an increasing feature seen across the board in 2012. Vlingo have developed technology that allows users to easily search for movies and programmes on their TV simply through voice commands. Products such as Microsoft’s Kinect and the iPhone 4S Siri have brought voice recognition into the mainstream and both obviously feature apps for social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

All things considered this should be an exciting year for sound and social both collectively and separately.