Citizen DJ: Making Free-to-use, Culturally Significant and underutilized Audio and Video Materials Readily Available and Accessible

Citizen DJ is an innovative project that fuses the cultural richness of the Library of Congress’s audio and video collections with the creativity of the public. The project’s main goal is to inspire new music by making free-to-use, culturally significant, and underutilized audio and video materials readily available and accessible.

The project, which is a collaboration between several branches of the Library of Congress, including LC Labs and the Office of the General Counsel, is targeted at communities such as secondary school students and amateur musicians. It provides them with resources to navigate the complex copyright system in the United States, particularly as it pertains to sample-based music creation.

Citizen DJ addresses the ethics of digital sampling by dissecting audio files into short clips, analyzing their potential for music creation, and selecting those that are loud enough, have less noise, and possess a clear musical pitch.

The website offers a user-friendly interface to explore collections by sound and metadata and a simple music-creation app for remixing collections with beats. In addition, it provides “sample packs” that contain thousands of audio clips from a particular collection for use in music production software.

While primarily an audio discovery tool, Citizen DJ also provides limited music production functions. Users can save their creations in various ways such as generating a unique URL for a new sequence or downloading patterns as .wav files.

Citizen DJ encourages users to share their music and allows them to use the sounds from the website in any way they wish, even selling and profiting from their creations.

The project is open to users outside of the U.S. and its code, which is in the Public Domain, is available for use, extension, and adaptation. To stay updated, users can follow the Library of Congress Labs or Brian Foo, the creator of the project, on Twitter or sign up for their newsletters.