FindSounds

Find
Stereo only High fidelity

Text Search
Enter one or more words in the search box above and then click on the Search button to find audio files labelled with one of these words. You can enter any word or phrase. Here are three examples: elephant, laugh, bass drum. To see many more examples, click here.

A text search is not the only way to find sounds. Click here to learn how to perform a sounds-like search.

Stereo only
Search for stereo audio files with 2 channels or more.

High fidelity only
Show higher-quality (16-bit or greater) recordings. Compressed audio files such as .mp3 are still included. Uncompressed audio files must have a sample rate of 44100Hz or greater.

Search Results
After performing a search, you will see a page displaying the first five sounds. Click on the Next button at the bottom of the page to see more sounds. For each sound, you will see the URL of an audio file and information about the audio file, including its size, whether its stereo or mono, resolution, sample rate, and duration.

Playing a Sound
To download and play a sound listed in the results, click on the link, or the "play" button  Play button.

Sounds-like Search
For each sound, you can find other sounds that "sound" like it by clicking on Sounds-like search. See the Sounds-Like Search page for information.

Colored Waveform Display
Colored Waveform Display
Each sound shows a colorful graphic waveform like the one shown above. This is the "Colored waveform display", which provides valuable visual information about the content of the audio file. Like other waveform displays, it is a graph of amplitude (or loudness) over time. Unlike other waveform displays, the graph is colored to reflect the frequency content of the audio file. Similar sounds are represented by similar colors, and changes in sound can be seen as changes in color. (For stereo files, the waveform display represents the left and right channels combined.)

Visit the web page
Clicking on Sounds-like search will take you to the original web page that contains the sound. Helpful information may be found there.