The computer-assisted design of soundscapes for virtual environments has received far less attention than the creation of graphical content. In this “think piece” we briefly introduce the principal characteristics of a framework under development that aims towards the creation of an automatic sonification of virtual worlds. As a starting point, the proposed system is based on an on-line collaborative sound repository that, together with content-based audio retrieval tools, assists the search of sounds to be associated with 3D models or scenes