What we do

Golden Gate Bridge north tower

The great gong

wikiGong exists to enable new forms of musical collaboration over the worldwide web. Inspired by the Indonesian gamelan ensemble, we catalog the sounds made by real megastructures and in so doing enable virtual instruments. Our work is available for use in performance or musical composition by anyone so inclined. Links to and excerpts from future works will be hosted here, too.

Notes on technology

some of our gear

Some of our gear

As evidenced everywhere on this site, it’s an “idea first, technology very much its handmaiden” kind of site. We’re not alone. And over the last decade, we’ve seen that much of what we built initially has been done much better elsewhere—which is as predicted, and we’re glad of it:

  • 2010: Two years on, we’d outgrown a simple page-builder approach and managed to add both a functioning wiki area using the MediaWiki engine and a file sharing capability based on ccHost.
  • 2011: Three years on, we realized that blogging was more of what we were doing than sharing.
  • 2014: Six years on, we overhauled our blog look to keep up with the rise of mobile phones and “responsive” layout. But it took way too long.
  • 2015: A year later, we started to classify major field-recording/soundwalk projects as blogs, recognizing their narrative value.
  • 2016: Another year later—seven or eight years in— we acknowledged that what we’d set out to do had been mostly supplanted by other platforms.
  • 2020: We’ve retired the collaborative aspects of the site. Our sound libraries are uploaded to public internet archives such as freesound and are still freely available, while our outdated platform fragments have been retired.

Continuing mission

We continue to collect audio artifacts of current civilization and upload them for use in creative projects. This site describes our process and documents our contribution to the growing compendium of earth sounds, with contextual links to the various archives.

Contact us

Reach out with ideas, concerns, requests, whatever.

Or comment on any page. If you do re-use the work, please comment with a trackback to your new composition to announce what you’ve done. We moderate all comments daily and will be happy to link back!

You can email lengthier missives to gongmaster@wikigong.com as well.

Happy sharing!

1 Comment

  1. Douglas Bland
    2017/10/09

    Hello, I’m with the Dirty Chaps and we are scheduled to share the Art Park stage with Wikigong this Saturday night in Long Beach for PUMP. I am hoping to get together with you about some logistical issues, such as sharing PA and lighting, etc, and maybe a plan of action. Please call me at [ed: contact info deleted].

    Reply

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