The vaporetto (water taxi) is one of the most recognisable sounds in Venice – the thrum of its engines and the chatter of passengers is the lovely equivalent of the constant drone of traffic noise in so many other cities around the world. A recording aboard a vaporetto not only places you instantly in the […]
Friday marked World Listening Day, a global celebration of field recording and listening to the world. We’re very happy to say that two separate Cities and Memory contributions are on two different albums marking how we listen to the world. Our recording from the British Museum’s clock room is part of Sonic Terrain‘s compilation for World […]
Back to Venice, the inescapable sonic inspiration for so much of Cities and Memory. Here we took a boat trip to the small, peaceful island of Burano, where a machine boat working on one of the canals shatters the tranquility with its noise – similar to the way the calm of Venice is often disrupted […]
Time for our monthly roundup of the best sounds from around the world, both those we’ve made ourselves in the Cities and Memory labs, and those submitted by artists and field recordists. This month we’ve had a bumper crop of contributions from lots of people, so there are six contributions and just four of our […]
Today’s sound goes back to the spiritual home of Cities and Memory – Venice. The title of the project comes from the astonishing book by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo recounts to Kubla Khan his voyages to imaginary cities around the world, detailing his extraordinary memories of what he’s seen. It transpires […]
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"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Grand Prix winner and Coup de Coeur winner, Académie Charles Cros
