In October 2014, I spent four days in the city of Hamburg simply listening to its sounds, gathering and collecting them. I distributed these sounds around the world to 32 artists and musicians spanning ten countries.

Each of them has chosen a sound (or sounds) from the collection, taken inspiration from it and produced a reimagined version of that part of the city using the original field recording.

On 3 November 2014, we presented 41 sounds in 24 hours to map and reimagine the sounds of Hamburg over the period of a day.

Today, you can hear all 41 sounds and explore the sound map in full below:

A collection of 24 of the sounds, representing one day, were released as an album in December 2014 by German label Mobius Spin. The album is available as a free download here.

The sounds of a city have never been presented like this before – both as a true-to-life documentary of a day in its life, but also as a complete artistic reinterpretation of one city, as heard by people from as far afield as Cape Town, San Francisco and Barcelona.

On the surface this is Hamburg, Germany – but beneath that, this is about the intersection between places as we experience them at the time and places as we remember them later.

#HamburgSounds playlist