If you've always harbored a secret desire to embark on a DJ career, now is your chance to test out your skills: the Library of Congress has just launched a new app, Citizen DJ, that allows users to create music using its audio collections.
Specifically speaking, the open-source app delves into the library's hip hop archive, which includes sounds that are up to a hundred years old.
"The golden age of hip hop was said to be in the late '80s to early '90s when DJs had unconstrained creative freedom to collage from found sounds," writes Brian Foo, the Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress, in his official announcement about the new tool. "I believe if there was a simple way to discover, access and use public domain audio and video material for music making, a new generation of hip artists and producers can maximize their creativity, invent new sounds and connect listeners to materials, cultures and sonic history that might otherwise be hidden from public ears."
The six available collections amount to thousands of hours of materials that range in scope and theme, from motion picture sounds to dialect recordings and, of course, a grandiose archive of absolutely free-to-use music.
You won't have to worry about any legal matters as the records have no copyright restrictions: you can sample them, download them, share them and do whatever you want with them, basically.
Either browse through the collections at your own discretion or search for specific notes and subjects. You can then throw your picks into a mixing program and add other sounds and beats to it—just like a real DJ would.
Ready to make some music?