Sound of the Netherlands

'Het Geluid van Nederland' or 'The Sound of the Netherlands' makes an unique sound archive available from the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. This collection contains over 10.000 sound recordings from the 1950s to the 1990s. It includes horse driven trams, venders and recordings from the ‘Elfstedentocht 1986’. A selection of 2.300 recording of this archive is now available under an open license on this website.

This collection shows the evolving soundscape of the Netherlands. The collection is made available for use and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. This license gives explicit permssion to remix and distribute sounds, as long as the creator of the recording is mentioned and results of remixes are made available under the same license. Making these recordings available with geolocation and year of creation provides an interesting dataset for scholars and researchers about how sound changes over time.