Great news from the OLPC project – 8.5 GB worth of sound library samples have been donated to the project by the Berklee College of Music, Berklee Music Synthesis alumni (including electronic musician BT and the international Csound Developer community), M-Audio, Digidesign, and the Open Path Music group! The samples are being released under a CC BY license and while they are intended for (and facilitated by) the OLPC project, they are available publicly, making this a a huge contribution not only to the OLPC but also to those looking for free, high quality, samples in general.

You can check out all the samples on the OLPC wiki as well as see a breakdown of the OLPC’s music making capabilities over at Create Digital Music. The OLPC is paving a new road for contemporary music education with this announcement and it will be absolutely fascinating to see how these samples are put to use by their intended practitioners. From OLPC:

“One Laptop per Child has inspired musicians to donate their sound collections to the children of the world,” said Dr. Richard Boulanger, professor of music synthesis at the Berklee College of Music and the organizer of the Berklee collection being donated to OLPC. “By providing extraordinary access to the resources to play, mix, transform, imitate and create sounds, sound effects, music and audio art works, this donation will enable children with XO laptops to learn about music and sound, and to learn about themselves and their world. This collection will inspire and promote incredible music-making on the XO laptop and will invigorate the creative audio work of all computer musicians.”