MIGRATION SOUNDS

Migration Sounds features 120 sounds and stories of migration across 51 countries from Argentina to Australia, with personal stories from diaspora communities and people who have migrated all over the world, as well as sounds from migration camps or dramatic sea rescues.

The project is packed with remarkable sound recordings, and – crucially – each is accompanied by the story behind the sound and what it means to the person who recorded it.

Taking the sounds of migration to an entirely different place, each recording has also been reshaped and reimagined as a creative composition by more than 100 musicians and sound artists from all over the world. 

Many of these artists are from migrant backgrounds themselves, and the compositions reflect new and highly personal perspectives on migration, settlement, home and exile, all conveyed through sound.

Artistic approaches used to reimagine the sounds of migration include the creation of entire lyric songs from the source material, electronica pieces, poetry, ambient music, sound art, neoclassical, spoken word and many more. 

So what are the sounds of migration? Often they are the sounds of everyday life as experienced in a new place – not just the sounds of the headline-grabbing aspects of migration.

Since the dawn of human society, people have moved from place to place and built new lives in locations far from where they were born or raised.

People move for innumerable reasons and each experience is utterly unique – moving from the UK to the USA can be as dislocating as moving from Cameroon to France or from China to Ethiopia. Moving to work, or to study, or for love can each be expected to lead to very different outcomes and experiences – as can moving for safety or protection.

Similarly, being away from loved ones, or the places and things that anchor you in a place can be intimidating: the apparent strangeness of a new city or town can make you profoundly aware of sounds that more settled residents might completely screen out.

So what are the sounds that capture your own experience of living in a new country? What are the sounds that tell you when you have found a new place that is “home”?

Accents, sirens, birdsong, train doors closing, cicadas, the sounds of calls to prayer, market traders, people in bars or the night-time barking of stray dogs can all capture a sense of place – but what are the sounds that speak of your own experience of moving between countries and places?

Why migration?

Migration is one of the most polarising and contentious subjects in policy, media and public debates worldwide. Politicians and media endlessly debate migration policies, border enforcement, economic imperatives and threats, social impacts and many other abstract concepts that shape our thinking about what the very idea of “migration” entails.

But it is critical to understand that migration is not one singular concept or experience. Every person who migrates, and every person who encounters people on the move, or lives in a place that is affected or changed by migration experiences this phenomenon differently.

So how can sound help us to understand these deeply human and personal experiences?

Why sound and migration?

There has never been an open public effort to collect the sounds of migration and discover what those sounds mean to the listener, giving us an opportunity to explore experiences and understandings of migration from an entirely new angle.

Sound provides us with a way to briefly immerse ourselves in one of the sensations of place that is hidden from us when we read a story or look at a picture, and sound can transport us to a place and a time more vividly than almost any other sense. We can all hear before we are born, and sound is an incredible part of our daily lived experience.

The Migration Sounds project offers a unique way to explore and understand human migration and settlement through field recordings, sound and artistic responses to those sounds.

If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to contact us.

Migration is one of the most polarising topics in the world today, with many conversations retreading the same ground. Because sound transports us directly and vividly into the lived experiences of human migration, it allows us to reframe those conversations and throw a new light on its complex and multifaceted nature. 

Sound also grounds our experience and shows that migration is about the everyday, settled lives of countless millions of people – not just about arduous journeys across borders. 

The reimagined compositions add a whole new layer of emotion and complexity, revealing even greater depth to what is already an extraordinary collection of sounds telling so many rich human stories.

Hearing a family being reunited after years apart, or ultrasound of baby’s heartbeat recorded in a country thousands of miles from the mother’s place of birth, tells a very different kind of story about migration – and engages people in a different way – than most news coverage.

Through this project, we’re trying to encourage people to understand migration in different ways, and to use different senses – in this case hearing – to form different types of knowledge about a complex issue. 

Listening to these sounds can give people a deeper and richer sense of what it means to migrate, what it means to lose loved-ones to another place, how it feels to escape or to feel “at home” – subtle things that define the experience of migration, but that a chart showing annual net migration or deportations will simply bulldoze.

The remixed versions also provide a fascinating counterpoint to news about migration – a form of emotional reportage: reinterpreting and reimagining of the stories that is the polar opposite of a fact-driven article in a newspaper.