Oh. My. God. I seriously didn’t think I could love the BBC any more than I did after watching Project Nim — the masterful 2011 documentary about a monkey named Nim Chimpsky (can we stop for a second to appreciate the brilliance of that name?) to whom a pack of noble scientists tried to teach human language.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
With recent news that old “Auntie” would be releasing 16,000+ (16,016 to be exact) free sound effects for download from its official archives, I just about went into goddamn myocardial infarction. (Ok maybe I didn’t personally, but I’ll bet you anything Michael Winslow almost did).
Anyway, that’s right: as of right-freaking-now you can ZOOM over to the official BBC archives page and start downloading some of the raddest, oddest, creepiest, most flat-out-fucking-awesome sound FX you’ve ever heard in your life. To pick out just a few of the most radical titles, they’ve got shit like “South American parrot talking and screeching” (which is over three minutes long by the way), “.303 rifle firing,” “11 month old baby boy bathtime,” and “2 Indian elephants growling and trumpeting.” Hell, they’ve even got an entire page full of samples from the 1966 FA Cup final at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Seriously, though, this is actually a pretty damn cool resource that’s now available for tons of different uses — from dicking around on Garage Band to researching school assignments, to…shit, I dunno, throwing together a Presidential Election campaign speech. You can even search specifically for keywords and clips by name; looking for “A game of bar billiards being played in a town public bar,” for example? Yup, they’ve got that one.
It is worth mentioning, however, that all of the FX have been released under a RemArc Licence, which stipulates that the clips can only be used for “personal, educational, or research purposes.” (In other words: don’t try and make money off that shit. THIS MEANS YOU, Michael Winslow.)