Whale walking
"In the development of Whale Walking, I used the recording of a killer whale as my starting point. After listening to the track on repeat over time, I decided I would try and create a broader world for the whale with the help of and a series of field recordings I had made of water flowing above ground and below ground, using hydrophones and a geofone. These recordings were made in the West Fjor...
4m Jan 13, 2023
4m
Oceana - The underwater world of Orca and Ross
"The Polar Sounds project is a great opportunity to both literally share and develop an augmented reality of the wonderful sounds of the Antarctic.  It inspired me to create my imaginary sub-seascape: Oceana - The Underwater World of Orca and Ross. I enjoy bringing attention to the importance, fragility and beauty of the natural world through creations of magical soundscapes and enhancing sound...
10m Jan 13, 2023
10m
Record keeper
 "Exhilarated, I listen to a fleeting moment, getting a glimpse into its magical world. A record keeper of all time. "Its gracefulness brings me peace. "Limited by my senses, merely scratching a surface, I imagine a sonic sphere, the transformative vessel. "Pulses carrying the pattern. I dive into the unknown, creating a response to its call." Fin whale reimagined by Þóranna Dögg Björnsdótt...
6m Jan 13, 2023
6m
An imaginary coldscape
"I composed my piece using samples of winter storms, ice cracking and windchimes, in addition to the original recording. "I started from the idea of imagining the sound environment where the fin whale live. The original recording gave me the idea to work with different frequencies, representing the different levels of an environment. In that way, the 20 hz pulse that the fin whale emit represe...
6m Jan 13, 2023
6m
Spectrum garden
 "When first listening I was overwhelmed by the density and how alien the sounds were. I felt a need to understand them, and to do so I dissected them. They turned out to be well separable in the frequency spectrum, and I then slowed the separate sounds down by orders of magnitude, like using a microscope. "To understand them even better, I decided to create a composition in which I put them t...
7m Jan 13, 2023
7m
Acoustic encounters of a fin whale
"This piece features a fin whale's journey through the polar soundscape. Due to its enormous size, the fin whale (the second longest whale on the planet) produces a very low frequency (20 Hz) pulse, reaching the lower end of the human hearing range. Based on the recording of a fin whale, a tune was composed, revolving around the reoccurring low frequency pulses. "The inspiration for this piece...
5m Jan 13, 2023
5m
Siren
Killer whale reimagined by Cheryl Beer. "Siren is a warning from the core of crisis. Environmental sound artist Cheryl Beer has created a haunting soundbite from the pulsed calls of killer whales in the Antarctic. First, she reduced the revolutions, slowing down the vocalisations x100. This enabled a distinction between each individual sound & revealed some surprising textures. Everything you ...
2m Jan 13, 2023
2m
Anxiety
"I chose a very strange recording. "On the one hand, it is natural, but on the other hand it sounds technogenic. I decided that all the sounds will be made from one file and they filled me to the maximum, chasing the longing for the lost home. "The name anxiety does not even refer to music, but to the situation in which the world is now. "And in this nervous similarity between natural and te...
13m Jan 13, 2023
13m
Upstream (the Seine)
"Last May an Orca was found to be swimming upstream the Seine. An effort to redirect the mammal back to the sea by using sound recordings failed as the animal seemed to be gravely ill and disoriented. Bioacoustics experts mentioned that the sounds the animal was producing were most likely distress calls. A decision to euthanise the whale was taken, yet soon enough, the mammal was found dead. "...
5m Jan 13, 2023
5m
Hoot
"The idea started by analyzing the field recording, and adding more instruments to play the same notes. Then I took a part of the field recording, and analyzed its rhythm and tempo and put it as the base of the track, then I recorded percussion and guitars. The field recording inspired me in the sense of trying to use it as an instrument, and as a composition tool at the same time, with the sou...
3m Jan 10, 2023
3m
Fin and glacier
"The sounds themselves are very low pitched, below the human range of hearing in many cases. In order to best make use of the recording, I took chunk and pitched them up from 1-3 octaves. From there, I processed the sounds with filters, reverbs, more pitch bending, delays, and time stretching tools to create interesting pads, swells, and percussion. "The long atonal pads you hear throughout th...
3m Jan 10, 2023
3m
Fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), recording 1
Fin whales produce a variety of short low frequency calls, of which the 20 Hz pulse is most prominent (i.e., a downsweep ranging from around 30-15 Hz) and produced by fin whales worldwide.  We record this call most frequently in the vicinity of Elephant Island, off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the 20 Hz pulse also often contains a higher frequency component around 89 Hz. ...
2m Jan 10, 2023
2m
The Antarctic Minke Whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis)
The Antarctic minke whale is the smallest baleen whale occurring in the Southern Ocean. It is regularly sighted near the sea ice edge but also occurs within the pack ice. The Antarctic minke whale produces a very unique sound called "bio-duck" which are repetitive sequences of pulsed sounds between 50 – 300 Hz with harmonics up to 1500 Hz. Recording credit: CC-BY 4.0 Alfred Wegener Institute, ...
5m Jan 10, 2023
5m
The Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia), recording 2
The low frequency calls of Antarctic blue whales belong to the loudest vocalizations produced by any animal. Most likely blue whales use calls to communicate over long distances. PALAOA records different Antarctic blue whale vocalizations. The spectrogram shows the 'Z-call' which is a population-specific song produced by Antarctic blue whales in the Southern Ocean as well as on their lower lati...
1m Jan 10, 2023
1m
The Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia), recording 3
The low frequency calls of Antarctic blue whales belong to the loudest vocalizations produced by any animal. Most likely blue whales use calls to communicate over long distances. PALAOA records different Antarctic blue whale vocalizations. The spectrogram shows the 'Z-call' which is a population-specific song produced by Antarctic blue whales in the Southern Ocean as well as on their lower lati...
41s Jan 10, 2023
41s
The Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia), recording 1
Recording credit: CC-BY 4.0 Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research 2022. Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (https://hifmb.de/) (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (https://www.awi.de/en/) (AWI). Explore the ...
2m Jan 10, 2023
2m
Polarchitecture 10
"I work with chance operations/indeterminacy (among other things), so I asked to get assigned a random sound clip (which I hadn’t heard in advance) to work with. My aim then was to build a sonic architecture out of this sound, but without pre-shaping/pre-conceiving this architecture, working with the sound clip as a sculptor-architect would with clay, wood, stone or some other material. I edite...
7m Jan 10, 2023
7m
Fin whale mod
"The faint voice of the fin whale is produced by shaking the sound-producing organs. The sound resonates with the resonance of wind instruments." Fin whale reimagined by Keisuke Oki. Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (https://hifmb.de/) (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Cent...
5m Jan 10, 2023
5m
In reverence of a blue heart
"The sub-frequency calls of the planet's largest animal, the endangered Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus), are too low for human ears to perceive. But this inspired some questions: What might these low frequencies feel like? What new sensations might arise? Would these feelings enter our subconscious? If I could play my bass flute deep into the waters of the Antarctic, how might I  converse wi...
8m Jan 10, 2023
8m
Aural ant whale
"The composition began inspired by the rhythmic part of the original recording, with the idea that the whole piece would follow that rhythmic pattern. But soon in the process this was changing and was leading to a more textural work, although it maintains some of that initial rhythm. "In addition to using the chosen sound and subjecting it to different digital and analog processes, synthesizer...
6m Jan 10, 2023
6m
Apnea
"Traveling through a submerged world, in "Apnea", all the threads that reach me are at a digital sonic level, because the only possibility of being able to hear is within this spectrum. "What would be the inverse in the hearing of these ocean giants? For a visitor like me, now, here with them, is to pass through my body like vibrations of a possible translation from communication to exaggerati...
9m Jan 10, 2023
9m
Profunda señal
"The first time I heard the Antarctic blue whale recording, I was amazed by its really subtle signal on my headphones. I knew I was not able to hear it entirely, because it was coming from far beyond our human scale of sensibility. So, I heard it a second time on my speakers, to help me bring the basses, and then, everything around my room started to tremble. It made me think of the Alvin Lucie...
5m Jan 10, 2023
5m
Sirens of a not so quiet sea
"When I first listened to this recording, my first thought was what a dull place to live. Upon further investigation a whole "mini" world opened to my ears.  The first manipulation of the sound was to speed it up 8x the original recording, this in turn reduced the recording from 60 sec. to about 6 sec. but exposed a whales phrase (I think) and some chatter (I think) like sounds. "I extracted a...
2m Jan 10, 2023
2m
A sister vessel
Behind every fireworks display, every public celebration, things are inevitably more complex than the surface-level jubilation. In every direction there are people with their own stories, many of whom might be experiencing complicated moments of sadness, frustration disappointment or anxiety, hidden away behind smiles of celebration. This piece reimagines a Bastille Day fireworks display with ...
5m Jan 08, 2023
5m
The Luis I blues band
Listening to the field recording of this super-talented busker, one thing was clear - his lo-fi backing track didn't do his talent justice. Therefore for this reimagined composition, we wanted to provide him with a full band back of drums, bass and organ as an appropriate backdrop for his soloing. Thus we created the all-new Luis I blues band. Harmonica busker in Porto reimagined by Cities and...
3m Jan 07, 2023
3m
Musical talent on the iconic Luis I bridge
A talented harmonica busker plays an extended - and impressive - selection of blues-inflected solos to a backing track accompaniment on the top level of the famous Luis I bridge in Porto, Portugal. On our travels we're always listening out for music as one avenue of field recording and we check out a lot of buskers - but this guy was on another level from most and we stayed for several songs. ...
3m Jan 07, 2023
3m
The navigator
In reimagining Sao Bento station for this piece, we wanted to foreground the feelings the space gave us in its own right, and background the distracting hubbub of tourists jostling for Instagram photos. The resulting composition is a spacious, stripped-back instrumental, in which the field recording lies throughout as a bed, held safely at a distance and only making itself known periodically th...
4m Jan 03, 2023
4m
The Instagrammers of Sao Bento
The Sao Bento train station in Porto is a stunning space and no mistake -  the entrance hall is full of stunning azulejo tile images depicting scenes from Portuguese history, and the feel is more of a stunning palace than a train station. Of course, given that it's possibly one of the world's most beautiful stations, it's full of tourists at all times, and the entrance hall seemed to be more f...
4m Jan 03, 2023
4m
Under Kofi Ofori's tree
In this composition, the rhythm of the frogs' song is the centrepiece, from which arpeggiated synth lines represent individual amphibians' voices competing and communicating with one another. The piece symbolises the rhythmic and melodic complexity and beauty of the songs of nature. The name comes from the origin of the city Koforidua's name, which comes from a man called Kofi Ofori who built ...
4m Dec 27, 2022
4m
Amphibians in a Ghanaian wetland
Sounds of frogs and toads on a hot afternoon in a laid-back settlement called Trom in the Eastern Region of Ghana. In the foreground are various repetitive textures in vocalisations against a subtle background of distant birds. The sounds seem to synchronise at some point and disintegrate into its unique tempo and amplitude within distinctive stereo-fields. Recorded during a 3-month project as...
4m Dec 27, 2022
4m
industrial terror mill
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk, are you talkin' to me? Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? Walk on home, boy ("Walk", Pantera) Inspired by the sounds of the watermill, which we have taken as a basis for our creation, we have developed a pattern that sounds similar to this, and based on it (carried away) set wild modulatio...
4m Dec 27, 2022
4m
Water mill waltz
The interior of an old water mill during an open day in Hannover, Germany, recorded by Jürgen Morgenstern.
49s Dec 27, 2022
49s
Bastille Day fireworks, Paris
The storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789 has been commemorated in France for more than a century. Today, the festivities of July 14 are as popular as ever and in Paris, the celebrations culminate with a magnificent fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower. Recorded by Colin Hunter as part of the Cities and Memory Paris city sound guide.
2m Dec 19, 2022
2m
The squeaky floors of the Louvre
Arguably the most famous museum in the world, the Louvre is said to be visited by 9 million people annually. In a long, narrow section of the Denon Wing the wooden floor panels creak and squeak as people walk over them, and with 9 million visitors per year this makes for an interesting soundscape. Recorded by Colin Hunter as part of the Cities and Memory Paris city sound guide.
5m Dec 19, 2022
5m
In the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre
The Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre sits at the very top of Montmartre hill and, alongside the Eiffel Tower, is one of the most visible monuments of Paris. Pilgrims come from all over the world to pray here as well as thousands of tourists that file in and out to admire its beauty. Inside the basilica is a warm soundscape with the sound of shuffling visitors reverberating throughout the ...
4m Dec 19, 2022
4m
On the streets of Montmartre
The Montmartre district of Paris sits perched on the top of a hill in the 18th arrondissement. Prior to 1860, Montmartre was an independent commune located just outside Paris and was the place to be for artists in the 19th century, with painters, dancers, writers, actors and musicians hoping to find success in the art world. Today tourists flock to Montmartre to admire the beauty of this quain...
3m Dec 19, 2022
3m
Birdsong and passers-by in the Jardin du Luxembourg
Jardin du Luxembourg is one of the most beautiful parks in Paris and particularly so in spring when the many shades of green are a gorgeous canvas for brightly coloured flowers and rich blossom. Birds sing, people walk, some sit and observe. In this soundscape recording we hear gentle birdsong with Robin, Blackbird, Chaffinch, Eurasian Blackcap and Rose-ringed parakeets, as well as distant con...
7m Dec 19, 2022
7m
The bells of Notre Dame de Paris
One of the most recognisable sounds of Paris is that of ringing church bells and none more so than the bells of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, located on l’île Saint-Louis and l’île de la Cité in the 4th arrondissement. Recorded by Colin Hunter as part of the Cities and Memory Paris city sound guide.
9m Dec 19, 2022
9m
French gastronomic passion at the Bastille Market, Paris
The French are passionate about their food and local markets are a big thing in Paris. The market at Bastille is renowned for its quality food and bustling ambience, quoted in the Lonely Planet as “arguably the best open-air market in Paris”. Popular with both tourists and locals alike, the soundscape is a complex mix of local dialects and vendors calling out to draw in customers. Recorded by...
2m Dec 19, 2022
2m
Old elevator, Cairo
Do you have a claustrophobic fear of antique elevators? Well, Cairo’s antique elevators can be more than one hundred years old and date from the era when European architects moulded Cairo’s streets. They are glorious and glitchy and can either be loved or feared - feel like stepping back in time? Recorded by Rafael Diogo as part of the Cities and Memory Cairo city sound guide.
56s Dec 12, 2022
56s
Skating in Tahrir Square
Egypt's skateboarding and rollerblading enthusiasm was born out of lockdown tedium and quickly spread from city to city as one of the nation's fastest-growing trends. In Cairo, the rollerskating community has increased substantially over the last two years to raise awareness of the sport and show off the beauty of Egyptian venues such as Tahrir Square. Recorded by Rafael Diogo as part of the ...
3m Dec 12, 2022
3m
Khan el-Khalili, Islamic Cairo
Located in the heart of Al-Qahira, the old walled city, Khan el-Khalili night bazaar is the place to stimulate your imagination and go hunting for treasures. Unlike many other Middle Eastern street markets, this bazaar has always been a place that mixes the commercial, religious and domestic. Spending an evening in the labyrinthine streets of this night bazaar will give you a great insight int...
2m Dec 12, 2022
2m
Eid ul-Fitr, Islamic Cairo
Eid ul-Fitr is one of the biggest celebrations in Egypt - in reality, it is a three day holiday in the country. The word Eid (from the Arabic language) suggests celebration, feast, and lifelong joy. If you were to mention Eid to any Egyptian, he would react with a sense of delight, musing a heart full of joy as if they were still a child. The best place to immerse yourself in the celebrations ...
3m Dec 12, 2022
3m
Al Moez Street, Islamic Cairo
Overburdened by the chaos of the older neighbourhoods, many residents are now moving to more modern and quieter compounds on the outskirts of the Islamic neighbourhood. They seek relief from congestion, traffic and, yes, noise - highways and flyovers now cut through historic neighbourhoods. Recorded by Rafael Diogo as part of the Cities and Memory Cairo city sound guide.
2m Dec 12, 2022
2m
Islamic neighbourhood, Cairo
No part of the city captures the vibrancy of Cairo like the old Islamic neighbourhood. It's the heart of the city, or in other words, “ the cultural spine of historic Cairo”. Nowhere else can you blend the sense of the historic with the modern so easily. Compared with the inner peace of mosques and churches, the chaos of the old neighbourhood is unbearable and makes it obvious that a group of ...
7m Dec 12, 2022
7m
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's
St. Clement's church in London plays a special musical set of chimes each day, partially based around the famous English nursery rhyme that features the bells of multiple old London churches - the rhyme goes like this: Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Clement_Danes) . You owe me five farthings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing_(British...
2m Dec 12, 2022
2m
Sno meld naseg naro
"Oranges and lemons sing the bells of St Clement's in reverse! "I took a short segment of the original recording and reversed it for the unnerving opening salvo, before I stretched and warped the bells into the climactic drone/thx-sound finale." St. Clement's church, London reimagined by Michael Lilley.
6m Dec 12, 2022
6m
Five water fall
"The composition consisting of sounds by modular and analogue polyphonic synthesizer plus the processed sound of the waterfall is based on the fifth case sequence. This beautiful and simple harmonic structure reminds me of the ever running water fall where there is no beginning and no ending. The circle of fifths is the basis of all harmonics like the water is the basis of all life." Cascata d...
6m Dec 11, 2022
6m
A rain of prayers
"I've always been interested in Arabic chants and calls to prayers in Muslim religion.  This is why I was drawn to this particular sound. "However, I wanted to be respectful of the religious aspect of the Adhan, and so I thought about finding a way to accompany the solemn moment of the call to prayer through the sounds I added to my piece, thus enhancing the beauty of the original chant. "I b...
3m Dec 11, 2022
3m
Grazia en Italia
"A tourist wanders through Italy, listening in on café conversations that become a bit heated; the weather darkens, thunder crackles, ambulances scurry by. But eventually the rain clears, the sun comes back out, and the folks in the café return to their peaceful conversation." Vicenza conversations reimagined by Valerie Polichar.
3m Dec 11, 2022
3m