Collecting waste

Upload your waste

Radios, composers, artists and people from all the worlds, free yourself from your waste!

Celebrate life by giving it a new opportunity to transform. Send sounds and any audio you chose to discard, whatever couldn’t be included in your final mix, bits and pieces which didn’t make it in the interview, random recordings you want to get rid of, annoying noises or any sonic elements which you think were wrong or useless or are just filling up your phones, computers, hard drives.

Upload it to WKR.

It will be collected into a database and fed into a composting algorithm which slowly degrades it into sonic fertiliser.

We are working on our algorithm and radio system: we plan to launch WKR in 2023.

How to contribute

Upload your sonic waste by clicking on the upload button (if you are reading this on your phone, scroll down to find it).
Once you give us your waste, you will be asked to promise to eliminate the original file and any copies available.

What kind of sonic waste can you throw into the compost?

All kinds of discarded sounds. For example:
– radio programmes
– recording sessions
– post production cut-outs
– field recordings
– interviews, phone calls, sighs, inappropriate laughter, ehms, …
– voice messages on your phone
These are just some examples.
You might have other sounds we don’t know of!

Formats: mp3, wav, flac, ogg, and anything that digitally plays.

Still not sure what we mean by sonic waste?

Watch our tutorial here:
English
Italian

And yes, it can be an entire song, an entire interview, all your old voice messages.

What will happen to your waste?

Your waste will be added to the sound archive which is constantly emptied by processing the files through the WKR algorithm. Starting from the 4th of October, you will be able to hear your sound on WKR being composted, however we don’t know when exactly.

 

Upload Sonic Waste Here

Composting CODE

Sound biodegradation

What does it mean to transpose such a complex phenomenon as the principle of biodegradation leading to the creation of compost, into a biodegradation of sonic waste?
How is it possible to transpose all the organisms present in the composting process, which are mainly: bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes?

The answer to these questions arose from understanding what it means, from a philosophical point of view, to go from organic matter to compost.

Compost is the result of the biological activity of decomposition of organic waste by billions of micro-organisms that, in the presence of oxygen, transform organic matter into humus. These microorganisms thus take the energy they need for their metabolic activities and activate a series of biochemical reactions that release substances such as water, carbon dioxide, mineral salts and humus, contained in the organic material, to give rise to compost.

So how can we imagine a transduction of those principles that occur in the composting process by realising them through a sound process? 

Fourier’s theorem states that any periodic signal is given by the superposition of simple sine waves, each with its own amplitude and phase, and whose frequencies are harmonics of the signal’s fundamental frequency; based on this principle, we have modelled an autonomous network that extracts its individual characteristics from the sound over time. 

Through the use of specific agents, the sound input to the system is then decomposed by extracting over time a variety of the individual components that made up the original sound, recombining them into new possible configurations of ‘minerals and substances’ extracted from the sound.

Luca Spanedda e Dario Sanfilippo

Github open repository
WKR Public code