In an earlier blog we wrote about a Web experiment where we asked participants to compare and rate sounds tagged with “bird song” (or “birdsong”) on Freesound.org. We then compared the quality ratings we had obtained with the Freesound metadata for each sample (such as average rating, how many downloads, etc). We found that 33% of the variance in quality ratings could be explained by the number of downloads per day of the sounds. An interesting finding – it hinted towards a rough-and-ready method for quickly sorting sets of audio into good and poor audio quality. Continue reading →