A video with sound is superior to one without, whether it’s music that fits the mood, or background sound that fits the subject, such as wind or storm noise for a weather-related video. But a series of still images that make up a time-lapse animation does not come with any sound. Here are a couple of sources for sounds that are licensed under a variety of mashup-friendly licenses.
ccMixter.org is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. The site contains everything from individual instrument tracks to complex songs combining many tracks of instruments and vocals posted to the site by separate individuals.
The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is where I get sounds like blowing wind and thunder for weather-related videos. I made but never uploaded a time-lapse clip of barge tows going through these locks, and I toyed with the idea of adding squeaks when the lock doors swith, thuds when they close, and gurgling water when the lock drains. The Freesound Project is where I would get those effects.
There are many different sharing-friendly licenses that authors can apply to their music and sound files. Many of them do not allow commercial reuse, which is the reason for a lengthy paragraph on this site’s About page. When a video is offered under a license that allows commercial reuse, but the sounds in the video do not, reuse of the combined work is governed by the more restrictive of the licenses on its constituent parts. In such a case the more liberal license on the video portion can only be exercised by separating the video from the sound.
