Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"Quartet is composed of the City of Venice and its mass bells from the original field recording. Memory rises not only of the Sea that surrounds me on the island where I live, but also of visiting Venice; the sound of water, church bells mingled here with the Bells of the island and my overlapping Memory of playing piano from an early age." Bells in Venice reimagined by Steph Shipley.

I usually play jazz piano, but on this particular day I was camping with my family — my wife, our two-year-old son, and our two medium-sized Japanese dogs. When I woke up, the scenery and the birdsong were so beautiful that I felt compelled to record the soundscape, and I naturally began playing piano along with it. Birdsong in Suwa District, Japan reimagined by Daisuke Matsubara.

This sound is the call of a bird we heard while camping with our family in the morning. It comes from a region that is usually covered in snow, but this was recorded during the pleasant climate of May in Japan. Recorded by Daisuke Matsubara.

"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train drivers that helped facilitate the horrors of the holocaust (some of them still working those same lines when the movie was made in the 70’s and 80’s) and those with the farmers and local people who bore witness to the trains that have the most i...

Ambisonics recording of the special acoustics and environmental sound inside the gate to Auschwitz II, Birkenau. Recorded by Anders Vinjar. 

"The source sound is open to interpretation but to me it sounds like I'm in the woods. I used a quote from Dante’s Inferno in it as spoken word whilst maintaining the original source sound in the background. It's about expecting things that should be in place by midlife but the realisation they're not; you’re lost in the woods (metaphorically); there are many paths to go by, and what one might thi...

"The feel of the song was inspired by the slow joy of the ambient sounds in the field recording, and the rhythmic sound of the waves. Praia Vermelha is at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, and after researching the place, it also became important to the song.  "The lyrics include a line about Henrietta Carstairs, the first known person to climb the mountain in 1817. The field recording continues thr...

A five minute recording is all it takes to tell what time day and year it is at home. Natural sounds like backyard native birds like Collared Kingfisher, Philippines Pied Fantail, Zebra doves, and Yellow-vented Bulbuls are busy asserting their territory and finding food in the morning before it gets too hot.  Migratory birds like Gray Wagtail, Arctic Warbler, and Ashy Minivet mean that it's someti...

This is the second edition of a recording I've made in the 2024 summer afternoon at the beach. It was made at Praia Vermelha (Red Beach), Urca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a hot weather, the beach was crowded: children, families, young and elder people, vendors selling drinks and refreshments (water, cold mate, coconut water, popsicle, and so on). People are talking, laughing, shouting. Waves a...

"I steered safely around the lions only featuring a loop of a growl buried towards the end of the piece. I was more intrigued by the sound of insects and cracking undergrowth, moving noises. These were sampled and re pitched. I added kalimba played through a granular effects pedal and it skittered around the mix. Percussion shakes were found sounds of beads brushed on a contact mic.  "Finally I ad...

A powerful night recording from the heart of Serengeti Central. Listen as a lion pride roars close by—their calls echoing across the plains for up to eight kilometers 4 . Hyenas whoop and cackle in response, while insects create a steady rhythm and night birds call softly. This is the African night at its most raw and wild. Perfect for immersion, study, sleep, or experiencing the true voice of the...

9.43pm, and by night the Jemaa el-Fnaa square turns into a musical paradise - gone are the grim snake charmers and animal handlers, and in their place circles of musicians fill the south end of the square, playing various forms of amazing Moroccan music. This recording moves back and forth between several groups, enjoying the music.  Recorded in Marrakesh, Morocco, January 2026 by Cities and Memor...

"Ambience sounds inside a carpet store in Kabul's famous Ka Faroshi market, people talking in the dampened acoustics of the carpets, shielded from a very busy market outside. Post 45 years of disastrous war.  This recording is part of the HEYR project, presenting 3-dimensional soundscapes from special locations, connected to special events. Find out more by visiting https://www.heyr.no ." Recorded...

In one of the indoor markets in Marrakesh's medina, olives are being wrapped, packed up and sold to passing customers, as we hear shouting traders, Arabic conversations and background music.  Recorded in Marrakesh, Morocco, January 2026 by Cities and Memory. 

Mega Huepfbergenland is a fun park for children, with 50 bouncy castles in one place, just being set up with no customers there having fun yet. What this means for sound recordists today is rows and rows of generators along the path by the river, allowing us to get close-up recordings of multiple generators as we walk past - an interesting industrial machinery soundscape coming from a children's p...

Electrical outdoor distribution box. Steady electrical hum, cars passing, car engine. Recorded in Agios Dimitrios, Greece by Konstantinos Staikos.

"An original composition created from a field recording of an Olive stand in the medina in Marrakech, Morocco. "I was initially drawn to this recording as Marrakech has been on my “to visit” list for some time and yet I still haven’t made it there. Anyway, I enjoyed the energy of the recording and the fact that there were people having conversations included in it. Usually, when recording, I tend...

"A pure sound piece, with something like 80% of it comprising the original field recording, processed, tweaked, reworked etc."  Djemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakesh musicians reimagined by Nick St George.

"The sound does opt convey a sense of space, but the location informed my choice. I took the original sound of the distribution box, chopped it up and added a modulator to change the pitch of the chops randomly. This gives the piece a rhythmic element that I was able to use as the backbone for a live piano improvisation on top of it. I did not change any notes but look some stuff away in the mix t...

"Drawn to the drone quality of the Mega Huepfbergenland recording, I made a quiet drone piece with a little 18th century cembalo at the end (ignoring imagined bouncy castles)." Bouncy castle park in Bremen reimagined by Eva Q Månsson.

"The recording I worked with was from a Ka Faroshi carpet store in Kabul. This consisted of several people chatting in a carpet shop in some language/dialect of Afghanistan. I do not speak the language so picked part of a conversation spoken between 3 men with different pitched voices. I have no idea what they are saying. I hope it's not rude.  "I formed a repeating pattern of this phrase transfor...

A Century of Sounds is a trip through one hundred years of sounds from all over the world, taken from the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It's a partnership between the museum and Cities and Memory, which is one of the world’s largest sound projects, aiming to remix the world, one sound at a time. 100 artists were invited to each choose one field recording, to be inspired by the stor...

Cities and Memory x NTS Radio: Sonic Heritage. Originally broadcast on NTS Radio in June 2025. Sonic Heritage is the first collection of the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. The project, created by global sound collective Cities and Memory, presents the sounds of 270 UNESCO World Heritage sites and items of intangible heritage – all reimagined by artists from around the world to create a...

"The field recording of a pedestrian crossing signal at Savignyplatz, Berlin, triggered immediately the memory of myself, in my twenties, living not far from Savignyplatz, learning to ride a bike as an adult. Terrified. Because I never had a bike as a child, my parents couldn’t afford one and where I grew up, bikes were for boys anyway." Translation of the text in the piece: Leaving the house, on...

A ticking pedestrian crossing (with the iconic "Ampelmann" light) at a road on Savignyplatz, Berlin, with just a few passing individual cars.  Recorded in September 2025 by Cities and Memory.