Green parrot lament
"If you have never been in/around/under a large flock of singing, squawking, vocalising and flying birds you have missed an incredible immersive experience. It leaves your breathless, amazed, scared and humbled. You can lose all touch with your world as the sounds of bird calls and beating wings drowns out everything else. "As I read about the Khajuiraho temple complex, I began to think of the...
10m Mar 24, 2025
10m
Nowruz in Isfahan
"I have long been inspired by Iranian culture and particularly its music and poetry. Much to my surprise, my response to the field recording of the city of Isfahan eventually took the form of a kind of oblique word-picture, prompted by the images and themes which the original field recording sounds brought to mind, which I then set to the sound of a Daf percussion arrangement. One of the main j...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
Tomb song
"The field recording begins with a chant that sounds like the ones the Taj Mahal’s mausoleum guards sing to demonstrate the Taj Mahal’s acoustics. Its dome has been said to create up to 28 second of reverb. I’d heard this before because of Paul Horn’s well known album Inside, which featured a singer — a friend of one of the mausoleum guards — singing in a similar style, along with Horn’s flute ...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
The last shepherd
This is our friend Vasilis, the last shepherd in Mikro Papingo, and Iannis, his Albanan helper shearing goats. Mikro Papingo is one of the numerous stone villages found in the Zagorochoria in the mountains of north west Greece. After wintering his flock of 350 goats in the Vikos Gorge, living in a cave for weeks on end Vasilis brings the goats and their young back to the village in the spring....
4m Mar 24, 2025
4m
Street hockey at Les Invalides
On some unused areas of tarmac close to Les Invalides and the grand boulevards that surround it, by the banks of the Seine, there are frequent games of street hockey. On an earlier visit to Paris I'd assumed this was a one-off, but every time we visited again and went back to Les Invalides, the street hockey guys were there, playing what is surely one of the world's most picturesque games of st...
5m Mar 24, 2025
5m
Seven seconds
"I firstly loved the sound of the piece and the atmosphere of the Cathedral - the original sound is included fully, but buried in amongst the sounds of the remix. The way into the remix was the text about the seven second reverb and some research about the building's history. I knew that whatever I did, long reverbs and delays combined with multiples of seven in some sequences would feature. Ba...
9m Mar 24, 2025
9m
Players
"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...
5m Mar 24, 2025
5m
Springcraft
"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 crocheti...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Tallinn town square by night
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 w...
7m Mar 24, 2025
7m
Live medieval musick
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 he...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Westminster Cathedral crowd presence
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 proje...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
The bell of Reval
"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 c...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
Fingers on fire
"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 buil...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
Echoic object 40
"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. Pre...
13m Mar 24, 2025
13m
Morning worship, Christmas Eve
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 R...
18m Mar 24, 2025
18m
Intangible waters
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 p...
13m Mar 24, 2025
13m
El botín de cada día
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 t...
6m Mar 24, 2025
6m
Talking with the Tower ravens
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...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Call of bells
"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...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Conspiracy of ravens
"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 ...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Noisy morning song
"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 l...
5m Mar 24, 2025
5m
Flavours
"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 ...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
The space between the eras
"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. ...
7m Mar 24, 2025
7m
On the streets of Dubrovnik
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 t...
18m Mar 24, 2025
18m
Nea Pafos
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 evoke...
1m Mar 24, 2025
1m
Obispo market
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://w...
1m Mar 24, 2025
1m
China syndrome
"I based my composition upon the 5 note motif from the original field recording incorporated at the beginning of the piece and repeated throughout using predominantly Asian instruments." Musical instrument on the Great Wall of China reimagined by Scott Lawrence Whitman. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. Find out...
4m Mar 24, 2025
4m
Dark bamboo
"I enjoy feeling disorientated sometimes; being exposed to sound worlds which don’t reveal their inner logic. The bamboo recording felt like one of those moments. "I wanted to take the rhythms of the creaking bamboo & weave something around it, thinking about nature, preservation and the encroachment of technology, as well as Brazil’s immense percussive heritage & influence. "The piece of mus...
12m Mar 24, 2025
12m
A modern reverence
"By integrating electronic elements with the historic sound of the cathedral organ, the piece highlights the tension and synergy between the old and the new, a dichotomy central to Vienna's identity. "The composition also speaks to the theme of sound preservation by emphasising how culturally significant sounds - such as the timeless resonance of the organ - serve not only as historical artefa...
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
St. Stephen's Cathedral organist
As I entered Vienna's iconic St. Stephen's Cathedral in the heart of the historic centre, a service was just finishing and the organist was playing a triumphant piece of music. I particularly enjoyed the long sustain held on the last chord. UNESCO listing: Historic City of Vienna Recorded by Colin Hunter. ——————— This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the ...
2m Mar 24, 2025
2m
Brief synthesis, integrity, authenticity
"In this piece, the monk's chanting runs throughout, initially heavily processed by various layers of granular synthesis, and very gradually revealing itself as the composition progresses, so that by the end all we hear is the naked simplicity of the original recording. "The composition represents how we often experience the beauty of World Heritage sites, at first overcome by a feeling of the...
6m Mar 24, 2025
6m
Monk chanting, Luang Prabang
Monk chanting at Luang Prabang. Stereo 44kHz 16bit. UNESCO listing: Town of Luang Prabang Recorded by Erick Ruiz Arellano. ——————— 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
1m Mar 24, 2025
1m
Early morning at San Agustin Church
An early morning at the San Agustin Church is far from quiet. Street sweepers tidying old cobblestone paths, the chapel staff routine inspections and preparations, vendors beckoning passerbys their taho or knick knacks, and local guides gleefully offering their services to wandering tourists. The bells of the Manila Cathedral toll and people crossing the plaza are natural accompaniments like t...
6m Mar 24, 2025
6m
Boiling point -196C
"This composition is intended to hiss out of speakers in a similar manner to the liquid nitrogen hissing from the storage tanks outside the Department of Earth Sciences. It's a sonic reflection on standing in this small street, being surrounded on every side by the sounds of humming machinery, coolant and air conditioning, the administrative machinery that underpins and helps to make possible O...
4m Mar 24, 2025
4m
The sounds of science
Outside the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, there are several gigantic, almost-building height tanks of liquid nitrogen behind a fence, encrusted with ice and with vapour hissing out from the pipes at the bottom. The sounds of hissing liquid nitrogen vapours mix with the industrial drones of other nearby scientific machinery and air conditioning devices coming from sc...
5m Mar 24, 2025
5m
Somnium retinarii
The field recording takes us from tour group to tour group inside the world-famous Colosseum, with each guide bringing their own style and their own facts and anecdotal stories about the incredible history of this space. This composition imagines standing at the back of one of these tour groups, half-listening to what the guide is saying, but then allowing the eyes to drift upwards, allowing t...
6m Mar 24, 2025
6m
Organ drift
"There has been a fascinating wave of experimental and drone music in recent years placing the organ as the centrepiece of a meditative experience, expanding out and stretching the sound into a deep listening experience. "This piece is in that tradition, taking four sampled layers of the organ and building a slowly-changing, contemplative ten minutes in which perhaps religious contemplation dr...
10m Mar 24, 2025
10m
Órgão de Igreja (Church organ)
Recording inside the Sé Velha church, Alta de Coimbra, when someone played the service organ. UNESCO listing: University of Coimbra – Alta and Sofia. Recorded by Luis Antero. ——————— 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
3m Mar 24, 2025
3m
Warp and weft #4
"My background is in the visual arts, with a primary focus on sculpture, particularly wood carving. Over time, I have become increasingly fascinated by the concept of ‘residue’—the traces left behind after the physical sculpture is completed. "Sound has emerged as a compelling avenue of inquiry, with the rhythmic tapping and scraping of steel chisels against wood punctuating my process. The ac...
3m Mar 23, 2025
3m
Dreams of the bell tower watchman
"I very carefully listened to scores of recordings before settling on this one and it captured my imagination instantly. It’s incredibly rich and mysterious. What was documented in this field recording transports us, I think, to a place both ancient and instantly present. We hear footfalls climbing rickety stairs. In the distance bells toll. And in the foreground a sonorous voice intones a repe...
10m Mar 23, 2025
10m
La Clerecía
The descent from Salamanca’s Clerecía Towers unfolds like an auditory time capsule, where each step resonates with the weight of history. The recording begins at the heights of this iconic cathedral, capturing the faint echoes of voices carried by the lofty ceilings before transitioning into the measured rhythm of footsteps descending the spiral staircase. As the journey unfolds, subtle hints ...
1m Mar 23, 2025
1m
Asante Kente weaving at Bonwire, Ghana with palpable textures
Mechanisms of wooden frames and wools in a seemingly textural sonic dialog during a Kente weaving session at Asante Bonwire. Among the Asante (or Ashanti) people of Ghana, West Africa, a popular legend relates how two young men—Ota Karaban and his friend Kwaku Ameyaw—learned the art of weaving by observing a spider weaving its web. One night, the two went out into the forest to check their tra...
2m Mar 23, 2025
2m
Morning incantation
I was interested in this field recording, taken from Kasuga Taisha Shrine in Japan featuring monks chanting their morning prayer. I’ve aimed to create a musical space that allows their prayers to serve as a background and a constant, with distinct sections complementing and reflecting the ongoing prayer and the approaching dawn. Monks chanting in Nara reimagined by Jaspal Singh Bhogal. ——————...
4m Mar 23, 2025
4m
Hypogeum
"The Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni in Paola, Malta is a Neolithic subterranean structure dating from before 3000 BC. A necropolis and a place of sanctuary, it comprises several chambers carved out of the rock with primitive tools. The sophistication of its creators is evident from the intricate patterns painted in ochre on the ceilings and the entry of light from the surface, which is thought to hav...
3m Mar 23, 2025
3m
Hal Saflieni Hypogeum tour
On a tour in the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, walking around. You can here other tourists on the tour and recorded guides. August 2008. UNESCO listing: Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum Recorded by David Webb. ——————— 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
2m Mar 23, 2025
2m
Morning prayer at Kasuga Taisha Shrine, Nara
Kasuga Taisha Shrine is part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara UNESCO site in Japan. Every day, monks chant the morning prayer (chōhai) in the Naoraiden (Ceremony Hall) and the public is welcome to observe. This recording was made on 13 December, 2024 and captures part of the prayer. There were 5 monks and 7 of us in the public area. I was the only western person. In the recording, you...
4m Mar 23, 2025
4m
Our tapes have nothing to do with you
"My composition 'Our Tapes Have Nothing To Do With You' was inspired by AJ Born's field recording particularly for the fact that the recording documents the end of a Christmas Market in Germany. This fact, and the general atmosphere of the soundscape, reminded me of two really special and memorable weekend trips I'd taken with friends in 2018 and 2019 – to Belgium and Sweden respectively, durin...
7m Mar 23, 2025
7m
Buddhist enchantment
"This field recording of Buddhist chanting in what seems to be a temple in India was personally very timely. After recently reading several books on Buddhist philosophy and spiritual practices, finding this particular field recording in the the Sonic Heritage catalogue seemed by coincidence to be the perfect source to work with on this project. "Having decided immediately not to stray too far ...
3m Mar 23, 2025
3m
A chaotic lullaby
I took a lullaby theme as a counterpoint to the noise. Firework sound samples provide rhythmical element. Chaos stabilises as the recording ends, to create a final sense of calm and serenity. Shanghai street festival reimagined by HDRF. ——————— 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 projec...
3m Mar 23, 2025
3m
Buddhist chanting at Ladakh
Buddhist chanting at Ladakh. Stereo 48kHz 24bit. UNESCO listing: Buddhist chanting of Ladakh: recitation of sacred Buddhist texts in the trans-Himalayan Ladakh region, Jammu and Kashmir, India Recorded by Erick Ruiz Arellano. ——————— 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:/...
2m Mar 23, 2025
2m