Cities And Memory

"On first listening to the sound recording, the sound of the hockey puck being hit placed me inside a life size pinball machine. I felt drawn to creating the piece from the perspective of the players being inside a giant pinball machine. From there I began to build a set of pinball inspired sounds to entwine with the recording.  "The soundscape was created using hardware modular synths to layer up the bouncing of the pinball buffers in response to the players hitting the puck. A further layer of distant arcade sounds and floating background music heard from outside the machine was added using software modular synths. Throughout I endeavoured to ensure the original recording and the story it told could still clearly be heard despite placing it in my own sonic world." Paris street hockey reimagined by Andrew D. Sage. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/h

"This track is inspired by both the sheep shearing clipper sounds and the season in which shearing usually occurs. During my first listen of the field recording, I imagined the ecosystem of handcrafting and repairing and was inspired to combine this recording with field recordings of my own craft, including whittling and sanding, use of a sewing machine to repair pants, journaling, and crocheting. "Bell sounds (created with FM synthesis and with field recordings, inspired by faint bell sounds on the original recording) and created “bird” sound serve as the underlying threads that weaves the pieces together. This track was created using VCV Rack 2." Greek goat shearing reimagined by Stephanie Vasko. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

A binaural recording made at 10pm in Raekoja Square at the heart of Tallinn's Old Town - we hear passers-by on all sides, restaurants and bars closing early at the end of a quiet night, and the church bells tolling 10pm. UNESCO listing: Historic Centre (Old Town) of Tallinn Recorded by Cities and Memory.  ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

Inside the popular medieval Olde Hansa restaurant, which specialises in serving original medieval recipes, a group of three musicians performs with replica medieval string and percussion instruments. Together with the wall paintings and candlelight, the ambience is as close to an authentic medieval banquet as you can get, while at the same time forming a very modern tourist attraction in the heritage site of the Old Town. UNESCO listing: Historic Centre (Old Town) of Tallinn Recorded by Cities and Memory. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

This soundscape explores the quiet stillness of Westminster Cathedral - the sound of slight whispers and occasional footsteps echo amongst the airy spaciousness of the church. UNESCO listing: Westminster Abbey Recorded by Paul Virostek. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

"The otherworldly voices and the haunting church bells drew me in…. I wished to be there, standing in the square on a cold Baltic night like a scene in a movie. Relying only on my imagination, as I have never visited the Baltic region, I was fascinated by these slightly atonal Estonian bells. How many times have they rung out across this square? How many folks have lived amongst them over the centuries? They clearly called out to me as they have done to many folks throughout the centuries.  "They became the initial inspiration for the piece. I matched the tone of the bells with a response on an old and very out-of-tune Persian Santoor. The recording seemed out of time and place and multitheistic, so i then added an organ drone to it. It felt like the history of the city came to life.  "As I also have ancestors who came from the region I am naturally quite curious about its culture and history. I hope that the sound of these bells and the resulting composition accessed some of the energy of the region and th

"The music heard mingling with voices suggests music for dancing, but there is nothing here to see. If this recording is found in an archive many years in the future, we’ll have to rely on context and assumptions that could have changed in the intervening period.  "The reworking of this music creates “impossible” instrumental sounds, while imagining a different kind of dance. In the pauses built into the tune, I find a connection with some more modern structures of dance music in which sounds are taken away and brought back." Olde Hansa, Tallinn reimagined by Isabel de Berrie. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

"The information age has produced huge leaps in the gathering and documentation of data. Someone who has never been to Westminster Abbey no longer relies on descriptions filtered through a commentator, whose powers of observation, agenda or eloquence are beyond their control. They can see maps, photographs, plans, reviews, recordings; access a level of detail unprecedented in human history. Precise representation is incredibly valuable because from this we can draw inference, deepening our understanding. "'Echoic Object 40' is a work of sonic archaeology. It subjects our artefact to various processes and deciphers details of resonance, tone, and time so that we might better understand its attributes. Spectral granulation allows the nave to sing to us; footsteps create rhythms as they move through the arcades; an impulse response becomes a reverb.  "From the one recording we assemble a stratigraphy, context, and interpretation. Westminster Abbey is an Anglican church, so there should be bells. It is a centre

This audio recording, captured in front of the church in Christiansfeld, Southern Denmark on the morning of Christmas Eve 2024, documents congregants arriving for the 7:30 AM church service. The ambient sounds of gathering worshippers culminate in the tolling of church bells, before concluding with the closing of the heavy church doors UNESCO listing: Moravian Church Settlements Recorded by Robert Cole Rizzi. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

I. Ocean furrows II. The liquid skin of story  III. Island protecting waves "What are the living sonic expressions inherited from our ancestors? This question came to me when I read the definition of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ on the UNESCO website. The field recording I chose from the Fisherman’s Wharf in Santa Cruz in the Galapagos Islands, is, in the words of Josué Jaramillo, ‘a unique polyphony, where work, culture and wildlife converge in an imperfect but very human harmony’. Listening to the recording, I was mesmerised by the sound of the ‘knives sliding on whetstones’, as well as the daily conversations and the flowing of sounds into each other. Watching videos of the wharf online, I was transfixed by the seabirds, iguanas and sea lions that waited patiently for -or simply took- their fair share of the fish meat.  "Researching Ecuadorian folk music, I came across ‘Taita Quishpe’, a song about the love felt by an indigenous agriculturalist towards their ‘chakrita’, the small plot of land which pro

Imagine a sound canvas where tradition, life and nature are intertwined in a vibrant auditory tapestry. The Fisherman's Wharf in Santa Cruz, Galapagos, is an everyday symphony. The air is filled with the metallic echo of knives sliding on whetstones, a prelude to the dance that follows. The precise sound of the knife cutting the fish meat is mixed with the soft splash of the water that cleans the pieces, creating a rhythmic percussion. The voices, warm and resonant, weave conversations that talk about work, family, and island life. They are spontaneous songs, laughter that escapes, the constant murmur of the community. And in this concert, nature also has its part: the guttural call of the sea lions, eager for their share of the loot, is contrasted with the strident squawking of the pelicans, fighting for a bite. It is a unique polyphony, where work, culture and wildlife converge in an imperfect but deeply human harmony.  This soundscape is a time capsule, an invaluable record of daily life in the Galapagos

The ravens are one of the most famous features of the Tower of London. Their presence is traditionally believed to protect the Crown and the Tower; a belief holds that "if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it." The earliest known reference to captive ravens at the Tower is an illustration from 1883.  Having spent the afternoon around the Tower trying to capture the calls of the ravens among the thousands of tourists, we finally get lucky. Two of the ravens are perched on a quiet section of wall away from the crowds, and we're able to get up close with the microphone to hear them clucking and cooing, communicating with us and each other for a few special moments.  UNESCO listing: Tower of London Recorded by Cities and Memory. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

"The original filed recording by Robert Cole Rizzi is for the most part a rather minimalist recording. We hear a faint breeze, the small rustles of people indistinctly chatting and walking along, all organic sounds lulling us into a peaceful scene. But then we get the eruption of the church bells! Enormous and arrhythmic, they seem to gather the parishioners into the church through sheer volume. There is shuffling and scuffling, the coming together of people, the opening and closing of doors, and then near-silence again. "I wanted to capture this sense of church-going in my composition: the call to sanctuary, the peacefulness sound within, the summoning by bells. Alongside remixing and manipulating the original recording, and inspired by the metallic rapture of the church bells, I worked exclusively with metal percussion: a small bell of my own, singing bowl cymbal, steel tongue drum and wire brushes. I found symmetry in the call of the bell, and the single note chimed from a singing bowl signalling the star

"I came across a legend about the ravens in the Tower of London, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The story says that if the ravens leave, the tower falls along with the kingdom. My composition, Conspiracy of Ravens, simply asks: what if those mischievous ravens are up to no good? What if they were able to pack their bags leading to the destruction of the historic site? "I loved the sound of the vocalizations of the ravens in the tower and so I lightly manipulated their soft coos and clicks in the original recording by Stuart Fowkes. I've added long, ominous strings, dark synth layers, sound effects, and some screeching bells to the uneasy landscape that ends in disaster." Ravens in the Tower of London reimagined by Bill McKenna. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage

"The first thing that stood out to me about this field recording is that there is no real melodic information. It’s all street noise, most of it not of clearly recognisable origin.  "Even though Dubrovnik is 4,700 miles away from where I live, in another country on another continent across an ocean, the soundscape is very familiar to me. Garbage trucks and ventilation units all speak the same language.  "In her notes on the recording, Ristić describes the noisy Dubrovnik morning with richly evocative phrases like: “textural and multiphonic”; “grinding machinery”; “the town’s growling bowels”; and “a constant percussive development.”  "She writes: “I could not help but be fascinated by how a landscape of such beaming beauty can exist in this hideous soundscape.”  "I kicked around a few ideas but eventually decided to have the work be entirely rhythmic. I wanted to capture that unfocused, only-half-listening state when you become aware of rhythms emerging from the background and soon you begin adding your o

"I tuned into the soundmarks of place, the culturally significant sounds that if heard elsewhere might trigger memories of Obispo Market Havana for those who know it. Drawn to the rhythm of a shaker entering the conversation I wonder if it’s adding flavour to street food being sampled by the passers by.  "While I can’t taste the delights myself I sample this part of the field recording instead and looped it, which also unexpectedly caught a ‘na na na na’ from the background noise. I found myself singing these vocables and imagining street artists performing in a place I have never been, the atmospheric hustle and bustle between the locals and the visitors. Other snippets of voices are heard in passing, I grabbed these and tried to create conversations between people and place, echoing between past and present, a journey between the Old World and the New World." Obispo market, Havana reimagined by Aileen Ogilvie . IMAGE: Paul Mannix, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimed

"The silence and absence was what inspired me deeply, like the resonance of air in space. It led me to some points where I was feeling the empty space as a non-temporal era, so I tried to add and compose some small scenes within the sound. "I was practising a bit of what's called a kind of archaeoacoustics, a way of imagining spaces from a historical perspective and with a bit of imagination. We can listen to a soundscape, a sound recreation of collective work, developed in collaboration with the Cães do Mar theatre company, with seven actors on stage, thinking of sound as a strange physics in which we can inhabit spaces, from different periods of time. We can also listen to some field recordings from different locations, such as birds and crickets from the island of Flores. "I used sound collage, field recording, my voice and a home made instrument that I called escuadra. "The approach of this work is that it opens from a night of time in which the cricket indicates the time of day, crossing the threshing

There is a little window, in the attic of a Dalmatian villa from the early middle ages, overlooking the dreamy cascade landscape of downtown Dubrovnik. It's early June, 8 am. A melody of old Mediterranean terracotta roofs plunging into each other is nursing a soft morning light. The polyphony of ages embedded in the stone makes the town glow from its neutron core. No corners are mislaid, and the fortress is keeping us safe. The window is slightly recessed, almost on the corner with Stradun, and a person with fine jumping skills could easily reach the roof of the church across the narrow street. It's Sunday, and the bells from the various towers across town are spilling their gongs. I needed to sleep a bit more. But the grinding machinery of tourism has its own agenda. Savagely squeaking swallows and the morning congregations of seagulls sound like a pastorale compared to the town’s growling bowels. Air conditioning units, pumps, kitchen ventilation, garbage trucks, delivery vehicles, wheels, and trolleys o

The absence of noise becomes as striking as the sounds themselves. The deep silence within the remains and caves offers a rare moment of solitude - one that is increasingly hard to find in today's busy world. The stones, worn by centuries of history, hold the echoes of lives long past, but the quietness of the caves offers a rare moment of solitude, allowing for reflection. The recording evokes the feeling of standing in the center of history, where the reverence of the site and the silence it holds invite introspection. It’s a place where the past is never fully gone but exists in the quiet spaces, waiting to be felt in the stillness. In this soundscape, the calm of the caves becomes the foundation for the ancient world, offering a moment of reflection amid time’s steady march. UNESCO listing: Kato Paphos Archaeological Park Recorded by Serge Bulat. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole proje

Market soundscape from Obispo in Old Havana.  UNESCO listing: Old Havana and its Fortification System Recorded by Jack Hyde. IMAGE: Paul Mannix, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage