Cities and Memory - remixing the world
Summary: Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world. The project presents an amazingly-diverse array of field recordings from all over the world, but also reimagined, recomposed versions of those recordings as we go on a mission to remix the world. What you'll hear in the podcast are our latest sounds - either a field recording from somewhere in the world, or a remixed new composition based solely on those sounds. Each podcast description tells you more about what you're hearing, and where it came from. There are more than 6,000 sounds featured on our sound map, spread over more than 120 countries and territories. The sounds cover parts of the world as diverse as the hubbub of San Francisco’s main station, traditional fishing women’s songs at Lake Turkana, the sound of computer data centres in Birmingham, spiritual temple chanting in New Taipei City or the hum of the vaporetto engines in Venice. You can explore the project in full at http://www.citiesandmemory.com
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Podcasts:
Wua Lai night market, Chiang Mai, Thailand, recorded by Marcel Gnauk of Free to use Sounds. "This market is every Saturday and one of the biggest and longest markets in Chiangmai and if I remember correctly the largest I have ever been. You can hang out easily 3 hours and get lost between all the vendors, the locals, and the tourists. "The length of the street is about 1 km with many little sideways alleys. You can visit the market starting at 4 pm until midnight. "If you don’t like crowded places then maybe you should go to one of the other daily night markets because it’s just crazy here. Thousands of people coming here each Saturday and walking up and down the small road."
Costa Rican howler monkeys reimagined by Cities and Memory. We've reimagined the howler monkeys as the monsters from some 1950s sci-fi B-movie, by splicing multiple trailers, soundtracks and dialogue samples from different Z-rated monster movies into a soundscape in which the guttural howl of these wonderful creatures takes centre stage.
Recorded by Marcel Gnauk of Free To Use Sounds. "I looked out of our apartment window and only two meters from me, I saw a howler monkey family with over 10 monkeys sitting and eating in the tree. I took my equipment as fast as I could and started recording and the “concert” began."
Birds in Chiang Mai, reimagined by Cities and Memory. Every sound in the piece is taken from the original field recording, effected and processed in various ways. The sheets of drones represent the "blanket" effect of hearing all of the birds sing as one, creating a sheet of indistinguishable song. The individual arpeggiated sounds represent listening in more closely, and picking out the songs of individual birds from amongst the noise, like tuning into one person's conversation in a crowded room. Image by Alex Martinez via Unsplash.
Hundreds of birds singing on overhead power lines, recorded by Marcel Gnauk. "I am not sure how many birds but at least a few hundreds are sitting on the powerlines and chirping extremely loudly. I remember a few months ago recording sounds of a few thousand herons in Bali but this one is a little bit different. "I couldn’t avoid the street noise because its right next to four site intersections. "I came back on the next morning to get some photos of the place but the birds are all gone. What you can see is a ton of poop on the ground, on the wires and on my helmet!"
Contact mic on fence, Unawatuna. Sound and image by Stephane Marin.
Contact mic Unawatuna: recorded by Stéphane Marin, reimagined by Pablo Fisher. "I've created a piece from some of the sounds contained in the original recording, with an added background TV noise (a sound from Sri Lankan television: "Good Morning Sri Lanka Shakthi TV 15th January 2015 Part 1" - YouTube Creative Commons license CC-BY). With a little of sound panning and some distortions from the sound editing software, always based on the sounds from the fence contact mic, which are beautiful." Image by Stephane Marin.
