Am I on my way south?
"Changing trains at Newcastle, waiting as people and trains go by, various announcements over the tannoy: am I heading away from Dundee or returning? This time I think I am on my way south." Recorded by Kate Laity. Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport and travel in a pre-pandemic and pandemic world. See the whole project at https://www.citiesandmemo...
1m Mar 11, 2021
1m
The world's busiest train station
Recording from Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, recorded as the world's busiest transport hub by Guinness World Records - with 35 platforms and more than 200 exits. Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport and travel in a pre-pandemic and pandemic world. See the whole project at https://www.citiesandmemory.com/travel.
3m Mar 11, 2021
3m
An empty pandemic station
"Liverpool Street Station one London's busiest known locations, a major connection point and second hub to business, sees thousands of people passing through in a single day. Normally adjourned by commuters, performers and tavern patrons Liverpool Street is all but empty (February 2021)." Recorded by Jon Bender. Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport a...
10m Mar 11, 2021
10m
Distanced
Liverpool Street station reimagined by The Gaye Device. "The piece is inspired by the sudden stop of everyday life,completely unknown to everyone at that moment and my own personal experience. The everyday sounds of travel we experienced became like ghosts to me over the summer of 2020. "Those chaotic, noisy, sometimes overwhelming sounds, felt like echoes reverberating away like ripples in a...
7m Mar 11, 2021
7m
Benfleet to everywhere
Benfleet train station reimagined by Simon Woods.  "The piece is based around the rhythmical qualities of the station announcer’s voice. Each section builds on travel to a different place before boarding the train, in the final section, and passing these places – although in fact once on the train you could be going to everywhere." Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the ...
3m Mar 11, 2021
3m
Arriving into Benfleet
"Just waiting for a train to arrive one evening and recorded one arriving and departing on the opposite track. The sound from the overhead powerlines as it pulled away was awesome." Recorded in Benfleet, UK by Shaun Malone. Part of the Until We Travel project to map and reimagine the sounds of transport and travel in a pre-pandemic and pandemic world. See the whole project at https://www.citie...
2m Mar 11, 2021
2m
Pandemic Underground
Recording made on the London Underground from London Bridge on the Jubilee line, February 28th 2021 by Jon Bender. "London's Jubilee line, major commuting route and popular pedestrian highway straight into the heart of the city. This clip takes you on a short ride between London bridge and Green Park, a typical tourist route if heading towards the Palace. Normally, a chocked ride - claustropho...
7m Mar 08, 2021
7m
Always falling
"Much of the inspiration came from the beginning section with manipulation of the  busking performance using a modular sampling tool... this created many sounds that were used for the rhythm parts.  I also used other sections that run through the whole piece as textures.This was a great field recording to use as so much could be taken from it!" Piece by Alex Hehir as part of The Orange Garden...
4m Feb 25, 2021
4m
The orange tree, the fountain and a long-forgotten love
"Rome's  Orange Garden is extraordinary - a spiritual place of deep significance to so many people over hundreds of years. My piece starts with a gently sweeping, dreamy soundscape that is 100% created from the awesome original field recording - so many possibilities in there! Granular synthesis and sampling techniques have been used on nearly every sound from the recording (including the mech...
7m Feb 25, 2021
7m
Il Giardino degli Aranci tutto il giorno
"On a cold day in early Jan 2021 (UK), I ventured through my snowy garden to the garage. Here we have an old piano from a school in Nottinghamshire. It is in need of renovation and retuning but some of the keys still work.  I recorded a number of improvised piano parts, many where the key did not register the note making just a dry hammer noise. These formed the basis for the track and when ad...
7m Feb 25, 2021
7m
The garden of love
"I was inspired by the busker singing can't help falling in love with you. I broke down the vocal line and stretched it to create a heavenly choir ambience and overlaid the original field recording drenched in reverberation and echoes to create a dreamlike soundscape.  The Garden of Love is a place where everyone is welcome, free from prejudice and hate. The fighter jets roaring overhead are t...
10m Feb 25, 2021
10m
Can't help falling...
"I liked the busker in the original and thus wanted to create some sort of loop of the guitar and voice and put some soft beats behind this. That was the basic idea of the track before I started to make it. Whilst attempting to do this, I used other elements of the field recording coming in and out in various places. It felt however like it needed more ideas.   I therefore used a sample of som...
5m Feb 25, 2021
5m
Garden of glass
"We looped a single moment and allowed others to float around it. We liked the idea of taking a kind of sonic photograph, bringing that moment in time to the forefront, zooming in and imagining all the particles making up the atmosphere in the garden within that moment." Piece by Kit Monteith & Al Sundvall as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists cre...
10m Feb 25, 2021
10m
Segments
"It's an exploration of pattern-recognition. Certain sounds have regularities, and noticing their timings can make the world feel like a working system. The birds call every few seconds, people walk by every half minute, planes pass every few minutes… Anyway, by jumping around a field recording in tempo, the sounds are sorted, and become easier to hear as a melody.  I used pure data, a patch t...
4m Feb 25, 2021
4m
Reflections of a moment through the passing seasons
"My idea was to take ambient elements of the recording and create a piece of music that captures those moments but also gives a contrasting perspective considering this particular moment in the wider context of the passage of time." Piece by Andy Lyon as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new composition using the same original field reco...
8m Feb 25, 2021
8m
Dew fall and the scent rising
"The field recording prompted me to remember the scent of orange blossoms as the dark came down in our garden when I was a child. I wanted to transform the busker's voice into a sound representing that scent.  The voices of birds and the water fountain are also retained. My aim is to convey an idea of the sensations of memory travelling from the 1970s through all the filters that time has adde...
7m Feb 25, 2021
7m
Nostalgia
"The audio file were turned to MIDI and rearranged into piano and strings tracks.  Although the result may sounds with a 'human touch', all the elements were developed exclusively electronically.  The melody of the song "I cant help falling in love" was used in a unrecognizable way. This overlapping of the elements results in the nostalgic mood of the title." Piece by Andre Perim as part of T...
8m Feb 25, 2021
8m
Eden
"I didn't want to stray from the vocal and acoustic song, which is the centrepiece for me. Heavy EQ to bring out the singer amongst all the background noise, started and finished with an aircraft engine roar. I put myself in the square with him and this is what came out of me." Piece by Mark Baker as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new...
6m Feb 25, 2021
6m
Satori in Orange
"When I was listening to original recording, some pleasant memories instantly came to my mind. Moments of epiphany, when everything is clear, spotless and matches perfectly. A certain deja vu, which felt like belonging to this particular place and this moment. Seeing into one's own true nature. Satori in the midst of an orange sunset. The basis for composition is bits and pieces (deja vu's) of...
8m Feb 25, 2021
8m
Horti Amoris
"This piece called 'Horti Amoris' and is based on the Elvis Presley song in the original field recording. I have taken the original chord structure, slowed it down to 55bpm and chopped up and reordered the melody lines.  I've used some glitchy sounding synth sounds and processed some samples from the original recording. I'm hoping that it still has the same journey feeling that the original ha...
5m Feb 25, 2021
5m
Why did he take me here?
"Listening to the sound from the Roman gardens and reading the description of the day in which it was recorded, it did sound a bit too perfect. I thought that it would have been fun to turn the entire scene upside-down." Piece by Cristina Marras as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new composition using the same original field recording ...
4m Feb 25, 2021
4m
Der Orangengarten
"Upon my first listen of The Orange Garden field recording, I felt like it was full of many micro worlds of sound waiting to be explored.  I imagined myself traveling from one sound world to another, recording my travels along the way.  My composition “Der Orangengarten” is a document of this journey through the sounds of this new world. One where my imagination took me to new experiences of ...
6m Feb 25, 2021
6m
Guitarists in orange, rearranged
"The piece is simply made up of cuts and pastes from the original recording. The cuts were pitched up or down, EQed and rearranged.  No synths were used in the making of this piece." Piece by Simon Woods as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new composition using the same original field recording as source material and inspiration - see t...
3m Feb 25, 2021
3m
Monet's Orange Garden
"This piece is unusual in that it does not contain the original field recording, but attempts to reconstruct it as accurately as possible using field recordings from our own database, a technique of "reconstructed field recording". Thus we have recordings of planes flying overhead in Oxford, walking on stones in Sicily, church bells in Italy, fountains in Seville, car alarms from somewhere els...
6m Feb 25, 2021
6m
Tagliatelle all’arancia
"When I think of Italy I think of pasta: I’d made noodles by hand the previous night for a classic Italian dish so I thought of treating the audio as dough.  Stretched the sound four times its original length, flattened it with compression and equalization, then folded it so the first layer and third layers are heard forward and the second and fourth layers are heard reversed. Named the work f...
6m Feb 25, 2021
6m
When I heard you there
"A beautiful spot invites me in, sounds of birdsong, and waterfall, and a voice drifts across, drawing me in,  his voice welcomes mine and we meet for a few minutes before drifting off to our respective worlds. An organ coda echoes what just took place and we are back to experiencing the beauty and natural sounds of this place." Piece by Michelle Breslin as part of The Orange Garden project by...
6m Feb 25, 2021
6m
Tessuti organici
"Music and sound as ultimate tools for creating and modeling reality. The moments and spaces are chosen, sculpted and assembled to create infinite new images. In this period of maximum closure and containment, music is the tool to unhinge the bars of everyday life  and get closer to sounds and visions now denied." Piece by Marco Marongiu as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memo...
9m Feb 25, 2021
9m
Aranciata/Persephone awakes
"Aranciata is one of my favourite words, with the years it has expanded to encompass many personal things besides orange drink. Aranciata, arancia, orange, naranja, naranjada. The sun, the light, traces of the past, a spring long ago in a city that, as mine, also grows in layers. The Orange Garden recording made me think about the phantasmagoric, evocative dimension of sound.  Ghosts, memories...
2m Feb 25, 2021
2m
Drowned in waves
"As I played this track on loop, I fell in love with the busker's weird voice, with the general atmosphere, with spontaneity... For almost a year now, I've been experimenting with the sound art form of "audio dreams". This magical atmosphere seemed like perfect material for a dream. Sounds in dreams are often not memorable, they are muffled, distorted, distanced - much like our everyday life r...
13m Feb 25, 2021
13m
Karhide Descending Orange Glitch Machine
"This started with cutting up lots of the audio from the Orange Garden sample and then creating loops from it to create the initial track.  This was then chopped up more and added to a new project where I came up with a chord progression and bass line.  This is the first track I have finished in Ableton 11 and makes use of the new Spectral Resonator and delay to warp the original sample." Pie...
4m Feb 25, 2021
4m
A musical afternoon in the Orange Garden
"Busking is very similar the world over. In most large cities you can find Peruvian flute players, Chinese erhu players, groups of drummers etc., besides the inevitable solo guitarists and violinists.  This version of The Orange Garden suggests that we not be lulled into ignoring the forces around us: forces of war, forces of all-pervasive surveillance cameras and drones (although maybe the ca...
4m Feb 24, 2021
4m
Evol ni
"I wanted the piece to reflect a walk through a garden and I have used various treated samples and synth sounds in it." Piece by Richard Watts as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new composition using the same original field recording as source material and inspiration - see the whole project at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/orangegarden
5m Feb 24, 2021
5m
Grovewalk
"Grovewalk focuses on some of the more ambient sounds found in latter part of the source recording to make mix that moves between acoustic and electronic space.  This section of the recording has both myriad detailed sounds and one large one - the plane - and it makes for a good shift in focus between them. The recording was processed so that the sounds are present while they shift in and out ...
3m Feb 24, 2021
3m
Orange you glad
"My piece is based on the old Knock Knock joke punchline, “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana,” and  the childhood habit of repeating words at nauseum.  "As I listened to the recording I was drawn to the muffled sounds, of conversations and objects just out of reach and to the inadvertent memories that orange trees conjure in my own mind, of a childhood climbing them and being stuck by the th...
2m Feb 24, 2021
2m
Natural to quantised and back
"The piece starts completely naturally with footsteps and gradually moves to a strict quantised time, before relaxing into natural sound. All elements are created from the source material with no external instruments. I used the footsteps, water, jet, busker (reversed), birdsong and bells. I wanted to use the natural sound of the footsteps as a semi-rhythm and bring in the water on the exact be...
3m Feb 24, 2021
3m
Molgren Abascus
"Their is a rhythmic quality to the recording, in the sense that events happen quite regularly (even when not considering the guitar) which makes the whole recording some sort of a frame for a composition.  Thus, I used the first 3 minutes of the recording, treated it with a bunch of effects and used it as a grid to add some synth, with similar textural qualities and harmonics coherence." Pie...
4m Feb 24, 2021
4m
Topology of an anthropic landscape
"Of all the sounds from the garden I found the fountain to be the most appealing - fountains and fontanelle are so evocative of Rome. And then there were the birds and the busker and the tourists… The piece I have made was inspired by the shifting patterns of water falling in the fountain and the ebb and flow of people in the park. The jets become altered bird sounds which in turn become alter...
8m Feb 24, 2021
8m
Fruit flies
"What do you get if you give one field recording to a host of audio artists and sound reimaginers from around the world? A hundred different tracks, styles and reinterpretations. What do you get if you give a beautiful field recording of the Orange Garden in the eternal city of Rome to Museleon? You get a bunch of fruit flies buzzing around a lone orange in the said Orange Garden. Yes, all c...
3m Feb 24, 2021
3m
Fragments
Fragments  takes the original recording and tries to convey the essence of the listeners experience by focusing on the small things – tone, melodic textures and fragments of sound.  I began by listening several times to the recording and picking out the bare essentials – the recording has several parts but is mostly dominated by the busker so that is where I started. I like to take small amoun...
4m Feb 24, 2021
4m
All time is time
“All Time Is Time” is a contemplation on selective memory and controlled forgetting, where details of a fragment of experience are exaggerated, heightened, broken, obscured, suspended and eventually lost in the mind’s flow of time. Piece by Gabriel Edvy as part of The Orange Garden project by Cities and Memory, in which multiple artists create a new composition using the same original field re...
18m Feb 24, 2021
18m
San Giovanni Fortress - Kotor city sound guide
After the hustle and bustle from the market, there is nothing better than a great hike rambling up the hillside over the old town. Up the mountain, stone walls zig-zag their way up to the crumbling ruins of a castle which lead up to San Giovanni Fortress.  Visiting the fortress allows you to see the beautiful Old Town from above as well as the imposing mountains surrounding it. The walls are t...
1m Feb 20, 2021
1m
Perast - Kotor city sound guide
We all have our dreams about special places and it feels like my past self had the dream to visit the little seaside town of ​Perast​, an abandoned renaissance by the sea with the most beautiful retreat in Kotor Bay.  Perast is the right place to sneak away from the crowds at the marina where dozens of cruise ships arrive every day.  Today, Perast is mostly an abandoned town, with barely 350 ...
1m Feb 20, 2021
1m
Kotor farmers' market - Kotor city sound guide
Usually as soon as I arrive in new destinations, fresh street markets are the first thing I seek out. I enjoy all the colours, tastes and smells of the fruit, fish and cheeses.  Here in Montenegro I just love the popular coastal recipes made with sun-dried figs, olives, cheese, and huge pink tomatoes slow-cooked down to sauce. My favourite daily veggie treat is "Sir iz ulja", soft cheese prese...
3m Feb 20, 2021
3m
In the old town - Kotor city sound guide
Surrounded by fortress walls, the old city area of Kotor was the cultural and trade center of Kotor Bay throughout the centuries. Any walking route will lead you past palaces dating from between the 15th and 18th centuries.  Curiously all these paths also lead me to find the unfamous rakija (the local firewater of choice) in one of these many cafes which line the square inside the city wall. I...
1m Feb 20, 2021
1m
Kotor Bay - Kotor city sound guide
If you are not wandering lost in the labyrinth of the old town, you might just be exploring the vast stunning Bay of Kotor, or Boka for the locals. As you travel its length, the Montenegrin coastline had a great impact on me as it gave me that feeling of the  stillness and peace that I was craving. Along the walk alongside the Adriatic Sea, I had the privilege to enjoy the well-preserved medie...
1m Feb 20, 2021
1m
Kotor clock tower - Kotor city sound guide
As soon as I enter the city the memorable clock tower greets me as I walk into the old city. This old clock tower is beautifully kept as the focal point of the lower town area and rings every hour as you get a feel on this soundscape.  The tower is one of the first things that strikes you as you enter the old town through the main gate and curiously, was carved with the same stone as the city ...
2m Feb 20, 2021
2m
Lockdown piano practice: Chopin Nocturne in E-flat major, Op.9, No.2 excerpt
"I've been practicing this piece through the pandemic. Chopin is my favourite composer so his music brings me much comfort. I finished playing the whole piece when I was 13. Here is just an excerpt of it played now at 24. We're in a third national lockdown and it's almost been a year since lockdowns started. There's been more than 100,000 deaths in the UK and every day I watch the news, that nu...
2m Feb 19, 2021
2m
Waiting in line for a Covid-19 test, Malta airport
Malta airport, February 2021 - waiting in line for a Covid-19 health check, recorded by Marcel Gnauk.  Part of the StayHomeSounds project to map and reimagine the sounds of the Covid-19 lockdowns.
1m Feb 14, 2021
1m
Welcome, welcome
Saudi traditional music from Jeddah reimagined by Cities and Memory. For this, I wanted to convey something of the mesmerising aspect of the original track, which had me interested in the first minute, but by the ninth locked into the groove of the drums and singing.  A locked-groove of a drum sample with a lo-pass filter is the rhythmic undercurrent, over which a simple two-note synth line g...
6m Feb 12, 2021
6m
Traditional Saudi welcome song
On a trip to Saudi Arabia, we visited the KAUST university complex, about 90 minutes north of Jeddah. As part of the evening's entertainment, we were greeted by an hour or so of traditional Saudi music, driven principally by multiple drummers and two interacting singers running through a repertoire of what were apparently well-known songs. This, the first track, containing the English words "we...
10m Feb 12, 2021
10m