Cities and Memory has worked in partnership with a number of organisations and institutions to develop an array of innovative sound projects that create new forms of listening, as well as valuable permanent sonic archives and opportunities for artists all over the world.
Some of our recent partnerships are listed below – we welcome potential partnerships and co-produced projects, so if you’d like to discuss an idea, please do contact us.
We collaborated with C40, a global network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis, on a project called Well-Being Cities.
Artists reimagined a curated selection of field recordings from 36 countries around the world to develop brand new compositions on the theme of sustainability, equity and well-being in cities.
The project launched at the C40 Summit in Buenos Aires in October 2022 with a central composition and accompanying video, an immersive sound installation and an embedded global sound map of compositions.
Our Polar Sounds project saw us partnering with two scientific institutes, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Together we developed a unique project reimagining some of the little-heard sounds of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, reflecting on climate change and the evolving sounds of the polar seascapes, as well as creating a research paper focused on art-science collaborations.
The Migration Sounds project is a partnership between Cities and Memory and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. It is the first large-scale exploration of the sounds of migration in all its forms – a unique global project to discover, explore and reimagine the sounds of migration, settlement, place and exile.
The Sound of Adventure is a collaboration with adventure travel company Exodus Travels to mark its 50th anniversary. Field recordists were commissioned to collect recordings from some of Exodus’ most popular destinations, with artists then developing compositions inspired by the spirit of adventure travel using these specially-collected field recordings.
We were commissioned by Dreamland, the oldest-surviving amusement park in Great Britain, for its reopening, creating a composition built from field recordings collected on site, developing a Georges Perec-inspired exploration of the sounds of an amusement part, and a series of “sonic postcards” of the seaside town of Margate. All of this formed our Dreamland project.
We worked with leading creative sound and light art agency Ithaca the 5,000 Miles project, a physical and online installation that uses spatial audio technology and ambisonic 3D recording to explore locations 5,000 miles from the UK. The installation toured festivals across the UK and was presented simultaneously online.
Oxford Contemporary Music commissioned Cities and Memory for two separate works. Firstly, a Memoryphones physical installation presented the sounds of the world via “memoryphone” devices placed around the city centre of Oxford. Secondly, we exhibited the real and reimagined sounds of Oxford at the UK’s oldest museum, the Ashmolean.
We presented a sound installation at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester, called the Inferno Sound Trail. Library visitors could explore our reimagined sounds of Dante’s Inferno across every level of the building – with a film screening of our Inferno soundtrack and a talk to launch the partnership.
Our Shortwave Transmissions project in 2022 was developed in partnership with the Shortwave Radio Archive, presenting moments in history from shortwave radio, reimagined into brand new compositions by more than 100 artists all over the world to create a new way of listening to radio transmissions.
We partnered with the team at Conserve The Sound in Germany on the Obsolete Sounds project, developing the world’s biggest collection of obsolete and disappearing sounds – all remixed and reimagined by artists around the world.
