The idea for this site came from my participation in the Music Weeklies Challenge weekly challenges. Every week a new theme is announced, usually just a single word, intended to inspire you to create a short, 1-2 minute track.
There isn’t a lot of rules to follow, but one important one is that you shouldn’t use sounds or samples you don’t have rights to. Not being much of a singer, I’ve had some luck using bits of dialogue from various public domain movies.
And I think it’s clear how my new project fits into this. I am starting with this list of public domain films from Wikipedia, and will be adding more over time. When you search the site, a list of dialogue lines from each movie comes up with a link to archive.org, where you can watch and download the movie, and a timestamp where the line occurs.
This lets me find a few voice samples that I can use in my music without worrying about copyright.
Note that the sound quality isn’t always perfect with these old movies, so you might have to clean things up a bit, and maybe even use tools like acapella-extractor.com or vocalremover.org to extract the isolated spoken words, if there’s a background music in the scene.
I honestly have no idea if others will find use for this project, but if you do, definitely let me know. And feel free to suggest more public domain movies I should add.
