Here’s where it all started – with one sound recorded under a bridge in my home city, Oxford. It’s a pretty ordinary recording of the River Thames, with cooing pigeons and passing joggers, but I couldn’t have imagined it would lead, ten years later, to more than two thousand artists from all over the world taking part in this project. Here’s a little bit more on how we got there…

Our first project was called Hamburg Sounds, a simple test of the concept really, in which I spent four days recording sounds in the city, and offered them out to artists to reimagine, with some brilliant pieces back as a result – and our first ever sound map!

 

This project really set the scene for how Cities and Memory would grow over the years, and demonstrated what happens when the collective talent and imagination of a group of artists from very different background is applied to an interesting selection of sounds.

Our second project The Next Station was closer to home, taking a deep dive into the iconic sounds of the London Underground, from “mind the gap” to “the next station”. This was a collaboration with the much-missed Ian Rawes of the fabulous London Sound Survey project, and between us we covered much of London’s extensive metro network. 

 

 

This was also the first project to get some interest from national media here in the UK, which meant more artists heard about Cities and Memory and became curious about getting involved.

2016 was also the first time we moved off the sound map and into physical spaces, with the Memoryphones installation presenting sounds from across the world through these fantastic devices placed throughout the city in Oxford. 

This was a year that Cities and Memory took a huge leap forward, with two major projects on two massive – and fascinating – topics. 

 

Sacred Spaces explored the sounds of prayer, temples and churches from across religions worldwide to experience the similarities and differences between how we worship around the world.

Meanwhile, at a time of febrile politics, we created the first ever survey of the sounds of protest and social activism in Protest and Politics, capturing anti-Brexit and anti-Trump protests as they were happening, as well as many other forms of protest.

 

This project – and many others – continue to grow as we add new protest sounds to Cities and Memory. So if you select “protest and politics” as a filter on our main sound player, you’ll find all our protest sounds, updated right to 2025. 

We began this year by creating Sounding Nature, a huge collection of the sounds of the natural world that became our biggest project by far at this stage. 

 

That was rapidly followed by one of my personal favourites, Sound Photography, a multidisciplinary collaboration between photographers and sound artists, in which sonic compositions were created in direct response to photographs, giving us the chance to present the project in the form of a “sonic photo gallery”. If anyone wants to feature this in a gallery or museum space, we reckon it’d work amazingly well, so give us a shout 😀

This year also saw the debut of our Ambient Sounds player, intended to accompany you in sleep, rest or work with blended field recordings from forests, seas, jungles and more.

The biggest project of 2019 was Space is the Place, marking 50 years since the Moon landings with an out-of-this-world collection of recordings from NASA and the ESA, allowing artists to make music from the sounds of Neil Armstrong, rocket engines or magnetic fields.

We also ran projects based on the sounds of Yellowstone national park, and using the what3words location system as a form of creative inspiration for reimagining sounds. 

 

Elsewhere, the very first Cities and Memory live show took place, in support of former Can legend Damo Suzuki – the first of a handful of live performances of pieces from the project over the years.

In 2020, the world went into lockdown due to Covid-19, and the sounds of the world also changed profoundly. We documented this with the world’s largest collection of sounds from the Covid lockdowns in #StayHomeSounds.

This saw hundreds of recordings from all over the world coming in, but more importantly the human stories behind those sounds as we used sound as a form of global connection during the pandemic.

With a little extra time on our hands during the lockdowns, we also found the time for three other projects this year. Smithsonian Treasures was the first of several projects focused around museum collections, as artists responded through sound to items from the Smithsonian’s incredible and varied collections. 

 

Future Cities invited us to listen to the sounds of cities in 2020, but imagine what the cities of the future might sound like. 

 

Meanwhile, Inferno took us off the map and into the world of literature, as we created an imagined sound world for Dante’s iconic representation of Hell. As part of this project, the contributions were used to create a soundtrack to the 1911 silent film L’Inferno, which has since been presented at the Sorbonne University in Paris and in the amazing John Rylands library in Manchester (click on the “expand” arrows below the map of Inferno to make it full screen!). 

2020 was also the first of our long-running Sounds of the Year compilations, offering up some of the highlights from across the ongoing global sound map and the Spring and Autumn Projects in particular in one handy package.

I’ve always said that I could give the same field recording to 50 different artists and get 50 completely different responses, so I decided to test it out. Taking one recording from The Orange Garden in Rome that had particular personal meaning for me, I created a project to demonstrate the idea, with astonishingly different and fascinating takes on the same recording from a huge range of artists.

Electronic Sound magazine got on board with Cities and Memory this year, with a special feature on the project in their field recording special, and a covermount CD featuring contributions to the project with every issue – amazing stuff!

Other projects this year were Until We Travel, a vast collection of reimagined sounds of transportation from metros to airports, and Sedimento, a commissioned piece using the sounds of Venice as a response to Pauline Oliveiros’ deep listening. Here’s the full piece: 

Probably the most long-lasting thing we did in 2022 was the all-new Cities and Memory brand and visual identity, which I’m still super proud of. The logo was based on a section of street map layout from Venice, at the precise point at which our first field recording from the city was made and added to the global sound map back in 2015.

The main brand colour echoes the traditional Venetian red to strengthen the connection between the project and Venice as its spiritual home, and as a city that sounds uniquely like no other. Elsewhere, sections and elements from the logo are broken apart and rearranged as a nod to the project’s core concept of remixing the world, one sound at a time.

This might well have been the most prolific year of the project, with three major projects all happening in the space of 12 months. Well-Being Cities was our first project in partnership with an organisation, working with C40 Cities (a group of the world’s mayors) to create a project focused on sustainability in cities to be presented at their major conference in Buenos Aires. I was super proud of how this one turned out, with contributions edited together into one central 20-minute piece that was played out at the conference:

Obsolete Sounds, launched this year, continues to get loads of attention to this day, and was focused on the vanished and endangered sounds of the world, from old VHS or phone technology to sounds threatened by climate change (and grateful to Conserve The Sound for opening up their sound archive to work with us on this one). 

 

Shortwave Transmissions was our third partnership in a year, with the Shortwave Radio Archive working with us to create a unique collection of really fascinating shortwave radio broadcasts, which provided artists with some brilliantly fertile material for their musical imaginations. 

 

As if that wasn’t enough, we found the time to take Cities and Memory to Coimbra in Portugal for a presentation and a live show inside a beautiful monastery – unforgettable.

 

 

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After a pretty crazy 2022, there was no let-up, as we kicked off 2023 with our collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Polar Sounds – a collection of rare and stunning recordings of whales, seals and man-made impact in the polar seas.

 

These were sounds recorded over many painstaking months by the team of scientists at AWI, and it was an honour to offer them up to artist and help to bring awareness of the plight of the polar seas through sound.

Another of my personal favourite projects was Music for Sleep, a collection of both recordings and compositions designed to aid sleep, rest and relaxation – truly some of my favourite pieces of all time ended up being in this project, and I listen to it often. Here is the special one-hour mix created from the project to help you get off to sleep tonight: 

Elsewhere, we travelled to Belfast to play possibly my favourite live show ever, inside the jaw-dropping Sonic Lab at Queen’s University in full 360 degree surround sound – a true privilege: 

Speaking of privileges, I was also honoured to be asked to present Cities and Memory at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts – a beautiful experience.

Almost there! The biggest moment in 2024 (as well as hitting the 2,000-artist mark!) was the launch of Migration Sounds, a collaboration with COMPAS at the University of Oxford that used sound to offer new, fresh perspectives on the debates around human migration. Without doubt this is one of the most important projects we’ve ever done, as it genuinely contributed something new to that polarising conversation, and the project continues to grow and develop behind the scenes. 

 

We also presented Migration Sounds as an installation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and at a live performance at which I was able to invite – for the very first time – other contributors to come and perform their pieces live. A beautiful thing to see!

Our other project in 2024 was working with adventure travel company Exodus to present The Sound of Adventure, collecting recordings and working up compositions to reflect what the spirit of adventure meant to each artist.

Outside the world of sound projects, we became a partner for the “Sound of the City” category at the Sound of the Year Awards, and a whole chapter in a fascinating new book Ears to the Ground was dedicated to the project too.

Here we are, more than 2,000 words and a whole load of sounds for you to listen to later, and we’re in 2025. It’s been another epic year, with the highlight being the launch of Sonic Heritage, the world’s biggest survey of the sounds of UNESCO heritage sites. From the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower to natural soundscapes and traditional practices, it contains some of the most striking sounds we’ve presented, and was featured in news media all over the world, including this excellent piece on PBS in America:

When thinking about this year we also have to mention Observatory Station, our partnership with sound artist Miyu Hosoi and the Barbican Centre, which was filled with the wonderful sounds of field recordings from across our global community for three months this summer – here’s how it looked: 

 

 

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We’re just back from a trip to Oslo, presenting the project and holding a two-night residency at the Nordic Black Theatre, at which we were joined by a guest musician at a Cities and Memory live show for the first time (thanks, Atul!). 

For our tenth anniversary, we’ve released not one, not two, but three albums to give an overview of some of the highlights of both recordings and compositions from the project – and you can even get your hands on Cities and Memory T-shirts and mugs for the first time too! 

And right now we’re in the thick of it, with our latest project A Century of Sounds offering a look at 100 years of ethnographic sounds from all over the world that form part of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s extraordinary collection. It’s been a pleasure to be able to invite participating artists to the museum to learn more about the collections before getting started – and getting to know one another!