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, sound commissions and co-produced projects, so if you’d like to discuss an idea, please do contact us.
We worked with the Barbican Centre and sound artist Miyu Hosoi to present Observatory Station, an immersive sound installation at the Barbican as part of its Feel The Sound sonic exhibition in 2025. The Cities and Memory community provided field recordings from all over the world, which were then assembled into the Observatory Station sound installation.
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.
We partnered with The Evelyn Glennie Foundation on Ways of Listening, a unique multidisciplinary project seeking creative responses to the question “what does listening mean to you?”. Responses were invited not just in sound, but also visual arts, video, poetry and prose to place art and creativity at the centre of a conversation about listening, and the value it can bring to our lives.
With the Pitt Rivers Museum we developed the project A Century of Sounds, taking 100 recordings from the museum’s vast archive spanning more than 100 years, and invited artists to develop new compositions in response. Artists were invited to the museum in person and remotely to engage with the curators and collection in advance, with the project presented online and physically in the museum. The project is now part of the museum’s permanent collection, and has allowed them to present their sonic archive in an entirely new way.
We worked with documentary production company and storytelling studio See Through Stories to develop soundscapes for a multimedia project depicting two different future visions of New York City, which were displayed in the UN building as part of UN Climate Week in October 2024.
The soundscapes combined rich layering of field recordings alongside ambient electronic production.
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.
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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
