Cities And Memory

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Created in collaboration with Kinnauri filmmaker Himanshu Negi Regesoi, this piece is a meeting of old and new, bringing a sonic archive to life from the Western Himalayas. From the Pitt Rivers Museum's sound collection, a field recording of women singing in the early 1980s (recorded in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, India by anthropologist Nicholas Allen) now becomes a portal for a young Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on his homeland/heritage. Through his voice a living thread emerges to celebrate a rich and dynamic culture - both ancient and modern.The original field recording inspired various textures and loops created to take the listener on a journey from the dusty archives of a museum in Oxford to the vast Himalayas, evoking landscape and opening space for exploring how we deal with the past in the present - to inspire the future. The piece includes the following text from the Royal Geographical Society online exhibition titled “Reimagining the Himalaya through the lens of diasporic indigeneity”: “Archive

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of music and spoken language (principally Thulung Rai) made by anthropologist Nicholas Allen in Nepal and India between 1970 and 1981.Recorded by Nicholas Justin Allen.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Geedal (bow harp) played in the forest with male voices accompanying.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of songs and musical instruments made by journalist Lois Mitchison in Cameroon during 1958.Recorded by Sonja Lois Mitchison.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

My chosen sound was a sample of a geedal (bow harp) being played in the forest with accompanying male voices, recorded in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve. by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno in 1987. I was drawn to the sample on account of its musicality, not just in terms of the music and vocals, but the lilting patter of conversation and laughter that resonates in these conversational intervals, conveying a joyfulness and inferred novelty and humour at being recorded. At its base level it is so distinctly human and as such I wanted to use as much of the original recording as the instrumental basis for my reimagined soundscape. I began this process by splitting out the voices from the instrumental elements and selected a section of the instrumentation which I stretched and slowed to see what kinds of sounds and rhythms I could split out further and loop. This first iteration resembled the roar and might of the sea, which is ironic as the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve is located in the land locked country of the

I ended up listening to this recording a lot in my everyday life, just putting it on and going to work, walking around the city I live in, in idle moments between work. I didn’t know an awful lot about Vanuatu, where the recordings were taken by Raymond Clausen in 1962. Having read the Pitt Rivers blog, I thought a lot about how people and societies move on and are changed, sometimes forcibly, by the world they inhabit, and importance of communication, across generations and across the world. Climate change and the threat of rising sea levels presents an existential, direct and profound threat to the lives of people across the global south, particularly islanders. The Vanuatan government has appealed to the world for help via the UN, which with the rise of the right and shattered consensus across the world is becoming increasingly toothless, but hope has to prevail. For the spoken text in this piece I used the information about the threat of climate change from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Vanuat

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

I listened to the first 20 seconds of the track, heard the hummed murmur of a Ba'aka voice and thought, "I can work with that." It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the engaging, immersive, gently rocking polyphony that the murmur develops into. I learned that the Ba'aka musical style is over 30,000 years old, older than any continuous musical heritage. UNESCO describes Ba'aka music as a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity".For me, the beautifully simple, deeply resonant recording needed to be front and centre - ancient polyphony, charming music borne of and a reflection on the spiritual forest the Ba'aka inhabit, now under multiplied threat. Deforestation, civil war - commercial colonialism is eating away at their home and aural heritage, even conservation efforts. Intangible archaeology is being lost. What will matter is what we do with these sounds. It is hoped that by bringing the recording into another musical world, I can in some small way help connect with their heritage

I originally chose the field recording simply because I enjoyed the melody. The women sang the same melodic phrase over and over with slight changes. I felt like they were telling a story but, as I don’t speak the language, I had to look elsewhere for inspiration. I researched the mythology and folklore of Himachal Pradesh’s remote valleys and discovered a common ghostly tale. If you are out walking in the pine forest and you hear your name being whispered it could be wandering soul or "Bhoot" enticing you to join them. It mimics the voice of a loved one to tempt you from the path so don’t look back or you could be doomed.The original melody was in quite a complex time signature so I used short samples of the voices and played them in common time. I recreated the original melody and variations of it in different instruments which would be common to the area. I wanted the voices to sound as though they were calling from within the trees and echoing through the valley to tempt you to follow. I used Ableton Liv

"To See and Remember" is a composition incorporating elements from a 1965 expedition field recording from the Chocó Department, in Colombia, by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith, who were then fellow students at the University of Cambridge. The recording that I selected, made on 5-inch reel tape, captures the sounds of the local Emberá people playing music with flute, drums and other percussive instruments. During my research, I discovered a 100-page diary kept by the field recordists, now preserved in the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Reading the manuscript, it became clear that Ambache and Saumarez Smith were deeply committed to presenting the sounds of a culture from an isolated part of the world – as they wrote in their diary, “we wanted to be put entirely in their hands.”While studying the manuscript – often with the field recording playing on loop – I realised that some passages of text could work well as spoken-word accompaniment to the composition I had already begun creatin

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen mainly on the island of Malekula (Malampa Province) in Vanuatu between 1960 and 1979.Recorded by Raymond Ernst Clausen.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

The original field recording was fed into a granular sculpting sampler to create bell like arpeggiated lines. Next, I chopped the field recording to extract key parts, intimate vocal moments, a solid stone hit rhythm and laughter. Isolated stone “hits” became drum parts, replayed and resampled then slowed. They began to sound like ghost drums, closing doors or belated fireworks. I recreated the rhythms, striking flints collected from Norfolk beaches and in a simple act connected across time for a moment, integrating them into the final track. I played modular synth parts, stereo panned over the recording, adding high tones and static improvised, sonic scribble. The final completed track has a dream like quality with a foggy, lost ambient crackle and haze. Voices drift in and out of the track, there is laughter as stones are struck and connect us through time.Women and grinding stones reimagined by Andy Billington.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the c

The field recording I chose is of a gentleman named Thomas Penniman performing an early 20th-century work song about weaving from the Gower Peninsula. It's a strange, compelling and mysterious recording, made in the winter of 1974. There's a repeated refrain, "Mrs Tanner has six sons/And they all sang like thrushes as they worked at the loom", which I loved. But then the song becomes quite angry because the sons have only been given half a herring for breakfast. It's not enough! Mr Penniman beats his fist, and it sounds like both a drum and a piece of wooden machinery thumping. The "song" in this version isn't musical as such, it's somewhere between a passionate poetry reading, an a cappella performance, and, as it goes on, almost like mouth music. Mr Penniman starts out in a determined, lucid way, but seems to lose the thread of the song as he goes on. I pulled at the threads of the recording's story and made discoveries. Thomas Penniman was an American anthropologist, and curator at the Pitt Rivers between

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of music and spoken language (principally Thulung Rai) made by anthropologist Nicholas Allen in Nepal and India between 1970 and 1981.Recorded by Nicholas Justin Allen.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of Chocó music and soundscapes made by students Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith in Colombia in 1965.Recorded by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

"Piano being played": recording of the second movement ('Sarabande') of solo piano suite 'Pour le piano' (L.95) by French composer Claude Debussy, performed by an unnamed pianist.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen mainly in Vanuatu (and South Africa) between 1960 and 1979.Recorded by Raymond Ernst Clausen.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Women singing and using grinding stones for musical accompaniment.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of cassette tape recordings of music and spoken language (principally Laarim) made by anthropologist Patti Langton in South Sudan during 1979 and 1980.Recorded by Patti Langton.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Weaving song from the Gower Peninsula of South Wales, recited by Thomas Penniman, former Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, who was preparing a manuscript on 'Work and Song in the North-west Gower' in his retirement ("Mrs. Tanner had six sons, and they all sang like thrushes while they worked at the loom").From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous individual recordings (rediscovered during a recent research project).Recorded by Robert P. Rivers and Kenneth Henry Walters.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Silenced Soil begins with a fragile artefact: a recording of Claude Debussy’s Sarabande, composed in 1894 and revised in 1901, then recorded on 11 April 1963 in Gillitts, KwaZulu-Natal, by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen. Its only documentation is a handwritten note on a reel-to-reel tape box: “at Gillitt’s, copy of Debussy, Sarabande.” No pianist, no studio, no context. The archive offers little clarity. Sometimes it keeps its silence.Listening to this recording in 2025, I was confronted not only by sound, but by history. Why was Western art music recorded here, under whose authority, and for what purpose, during a period still shaped by colonial power? Before reshaping the music, I had to confront my own position as a descendant of European colonisers. This inherited legacy uncomfortable but necessary became central to the work, sharpening my awareness of cultural imposition, culture colonialism and ongoing calls for restitution.From this reckoning, Silenced Soil emerged. I treated Debussy’s melody as a