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 ...
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The busy building and streetscape sounds are granulated and diffused into the pulsing patterns of the Moog Subharmonicon, blurring human activity into a kind of civic harmony. These are the sounds of a society assembling itself. Construction noise in New York reimagined by Alan Cook.저자 Cities and Memory
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Lower East Side, Manhattan, NYC. A lively construction site with screaming saws, various impacts and machinery echoing off down the side streets near Essex Market in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Recorded with an X-Y stereo pair. Recorded by Casey Danielson.저자 Cities and Memory
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This recording is taken with an Open Wave-Receiver, a custom made foxhole radio modded from a Shortwave Collective design. The aerial was strung up to the barbed wire fence around Yanchep Substation; the electromagnetic pulse capturing an invisible soundscape, this community’s lifeline to the power grid. Recorded in Perth, Australia by Aliesha King…
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"I heard the electronic hum of the substation and the chat from people near it. I supported the recording with a warm drone and proceeded to extract the harmonics and frequencies from the hum and chatter with the MakeNoise Tape and Microsound Music Machine. The improvisations were then edited. A copy was treated with postproduction effects, and bot…
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A service at Sensō-ji, Buddhist temple in Tokyo, praying to Avalokiteshvara is a highly revered bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism, known as the embodiment of compassion. The congregation are business men. Tourists pour money into the offering box drawing an omikuji. The sound of the money clinking is juxtaposed with the Buddhist priests chanting and…
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"I chose this recording because I’ve always been interested in reimagining folk music, and I’ve previously created an album that incorporates elements of Chinese folk traditions. The sample of Japanese Buddhist chanting particularly intrigued me. I noticed that while the chanting itself has a strong rhythmic quality, the background voices and envir…
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"Inspired by the description of the experience by the collector of these sounds, Andrea Lynn, I explored this recording of a cold, mysterious place inhospitable to humans, yet home to arctic aquatic creatures who rely on the ice above. "The original soundscape is highlighted throughout with frequency filtering only, and I created sparse added textu…
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In July 2024 at 90° N my acoustic equipment slid into a hole 15 cm in diameter that our team had drilled into the sea ice. Midnight sun tossed shadows at the fog, slowing the wind just enough. My fingers trembled, but not from the frigid temperatures. I couldn't imagine what I might hear here, beneath the ice floes at the top of the world. Science …
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Fascinating micro-sounds from Coral Beach, when tiny, slow and quiet waves on this unique beach made of tiny stone, coral and shell fragments creates a beautiful "whooshing" sound with every pass. Recorded on Coral Beach on the Isle of Skye by Cities and Memory, April 2025.저자 Cities and Memory
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Recording inside an open air vent inside the two metre-thick wall of the concrete bunker building that forms the Boros Collection. The space has a fascinating past as a shelter, a prison for political prisoners, and a techno and sex club - and now it hosts a conceptual art exhibition. The sound captures both the muffled sounds of museum-goers on on…
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"Taking Brian Eno's chopped tape ambient recordings as inspiration, I chopped up sampled loops of Chopin's 'Nocture C sharp in minor,' creating long and short sequences that I then initially synced, before letting them run in and out of time with each other, gently applying FX along the way. "The field recording inspired this notion of a paid sessi…
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Aboard a tourist boat from Loch Coruisk to Elgol, with different tones, speeds and intensity of engine noise blending with the sound of waves. Recorded on the Isle of Skye by Cities and Memory, April 2025.저자 Cities and Memory
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A quiet and nice village besides Yellow River at Lanzhou City. QinQiang opera from the loud speaker in the village and this is very local sound. Happy birds are busy on working. What a wonderful soundscape. Recorded by Digimonk. IMAGE: Sigismund von Dobschütz, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons…
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"'In Passage' was inspired by the field recording “Boat engines roar, Loch Coruisk” by Cities and Memory. I love this field recording of a tourist boat and wanted to enhance it with additional recordings from my library, including boat and shoreline field recordings, a contact microphone recording of a metal park gate, and sonic excerpts of other f…
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"I put the original recording through a bit of distortion, listened to it for a while, and then went over it with some text from my phone notes that felt like it fitted the original sounds. My practice involves extended vocal techniques, I tried to treat the original recording as a collaborator in the same space as me to some extent." Lanzhou City …
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"This six-minute composition combines the Isle of Skye Coral Beach recording with my own field recordings of water and hands passing through shells of an invasive species, from Lake Michigan at Europe Bay (in Northern Wisconsin) near where I grew up. I've been developing several compositions about waves, and movements across geographies - the Isle …
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"I've never been to the Dolomites before, but a close friend was recently there. He showed me his photos of the mountain range and told me about the locals and hikers he met along the trails and in the backcountry. Seems amazing. His stories supplemented the original field recording in a way that enabled me to start working on the music. "I knew I …
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Taking a break next in a pasture on a hike in the Dolomites, while we admire the view we can hear birdsong in the trees surrounding us and the gentle buzz of insects. Recorded by Cities and Memory, July 2025.저자 Cities and Memory
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"My first ever autumn was in Berlin and I also worked for a year in German train stations, so this field recording has an emotional weight for me. The title refers to unused train stations that were closed due to the division of the city during the Cold War. "It means 'Ghost Stations' in German. For me, the memories of those train stations are like…
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A walkthrough of Berlin's main station, with announcements drenched in the huge reverb of the station hall, then the classic sounds of trolley bags, escalators, passengers as we explore this vast station and make our way underground to the U-bahn. Recorded in Berlin by Cities and Memory, September 2025.…
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"A captivating field recording of fog machines in an outdoor setting was fed into a number of granular synth engines. This resulted in crackles, reverb shadow and drift. Different colours and movement ( fog drift) in the reimagined track emerged. "I built and recorded a number of different passages settling on a drifting, arpeggiated loop which all…
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A remarkable fog installation in the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, by Fujiko Nakaya. This site-specific installation activates once per hour, and fills the garden with vaporous fog, playing with the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Fog formations emerge from different sides of the garden, blending with the trees and perm…
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Inside the Boros Collection bunker, listening to a sound installation of distorted bells on a speaker suspended by chains, made by Eliza Douglas. The space has a fascinating past as a shelter, a prison for political prisoners, and a techno and sex club - and now it hosts a conceptual art exhibition. The sound captures both the muffled sounds of mus…
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"I have a long history with Berlin, and this contemporary art bunker represents very well everything the city means for me. It's deep, dark, yet lively and hopeful. This is my love letter to Berlin." Boros Collection sound installation in Berlin reimagined by the figurehead.저자 Cities and Memory
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"The sound of calling to prayers from mosques is featured in the original field recording; it's a very vague and distant call accompanied by street sound and people chatter, but it's still breathtaking. It's even more fascinating that the exact timings of this chant vary daily based on astronomical calculations. I've never been to Turkey and not re…
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Visiting Istanbul for the purpose of recording was fascinating because one could find locations in the city without too much car sounds. This was in 2013. I wanted to go to the Asian side of Istanbul to Kadiköy. There I found a small side street and recorded. I am not religious in any way but still always enjoyed the call for the prayers. Recorded …
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"I’ve always viewed and listened to the ocean in a special way, and the sounds of the field recording inspired me to create this piece. I called it Impermanence for a couple of reasons… just like our lives and our consciousness, the waves are both individual and part of the ocean at the same time - all and one. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,…
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The sunsets on Malapascua Island in the Philippines feel like explosions in the sky — wild, breathtaking, and almost unreal. But beneath that blaze of colour, it’s the sound of the waves that holds you — soft laps against the shoreline, repeating like a forgotten lullaby. I stayed there alone, wrapped in the rhythm of the sea, as if time had unrave…
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"A woman writes a message during her daily tram commute to work. Seemingly insignificant details, like selling a table or a couch, hide a deeply personal story about love, and the fragility of the hope for new beginnings." Melbourne tram journey reimagined by Cristina Marras.저자 Cities and Memory
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This recording from 2025 captures a short commute using Melbourne's iconic trams in the city centre. It's not unusual for trams to be packed and this afternoon was no exception as many people were also heading to a football game. The clatter of the trams mingle with conversations and crosswalks, bringing the Melbourne CBD to life. Recorded in Melbo…
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"Invisible Anchor is a downtempo ambient track centred around a seismic field recording of an electricity pylon, this served as the primary background pad. The field recording was tuned to the track's key using Temperance Pro from Eventide and it matched the track length precisely. For the overall character, the master mix was run through Air Music…
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This is a recording made with a seismic microphone attached to an electricity pylon in the English countryside in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. The sounds come from the wind vibrating the entire structure, as captured by this specialist microphone. Recorded by Cities and Memory.저자 Cities and Memory
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"Thinking about the ascent and the vastness of Gran Sasso Park I stretched sounds to hold the sound of the water and this suggested voices so Caruso takes a trip to the park." Gran Sasso park in Italy reimagined by Stuart Wilding.저자 Cities and Memory
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Living with an isolated Shipibo indigenous family in the Peruvian Amazon, this recording features an ícaro titled "Yoi Jacon" ("another world") by curandera Ronin Mea. The chant speaks of a realm beyond our own, filled with ancient wisdom, amidst the backdrop of a disappearing way of life due to deforestation and modernization. Recorded by Rafael D…
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The gentle tinkling of cowbells in a field among the Dolomites at the end of a long summer afternoon. Recorded in Colmean, Italy by Cities and Memory, June 2025.저자 Cities and Memory
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"The field recording is a completed song, sung to the backdrop of a symphony of sounds apparently arising from the Peruvian Amazon setting where the performance and recoding took place. The chant/song repeats and winds upwards in tonal centre as it journeys through a call and response form. "My composition takes shape as a tribute to the eternal, c…
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"I liked the tonal qualities of this recording. There is a constantly varying pattern of sound: the cars, trucks and buses never pass over in the same configuration so the tones will always combine differently. Each time I improvised this musical re-creation was also unique. The different patterns of sound could have gone on for eternity, but here …
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The Hawthorne Bridge, built in 1910 is the oldest vertical lift bridge in the USA and the oldest highway bridge in Portland, Oregon. I stood beneath it one sunny summer day, as the traffic passed over the open steel grills of the carriageway creating the rushing tones in this recording. Recorded by Paul Stephens-Wood.…
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"I thought about the cows maybe wanting someone else to jam along with in the Dolomites, and then a bunch of choristers turn up with a wannabe DJ in tow, and they end up getting it together just in time for milking." Cowbells in Colmean, the Dolomites reimagined by Rod Dykeman.저자 Cities and Memory
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Persistent, detailed creaking wood and metal sounds coming from the floating dock structure on Hovedoya island, Oslo, along with gentle wave sounds underneath, September 2025. Recorded by Cities and Memory.저자 Cities and Memory
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"I really liked the calmness of the sea which contrasted with the harsher sounding creaking wood and metal sounds. I created a track that features and contrasts between these two sounds. "I used a variety of samplers, loopers, delays, reverbs and other effects to create an ambient, tape-loop, drone type of track with a stilted - wonky - rhythm crea…
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"It is a wonderful and relaxing recording that evokes sitting down and unwinding after a long day. I chose to include a few happy and playful guitar tracks, maybe like the music a person would strum themselves or listen to whilst sitting by a river before bedtime. A very joyful recording session for the Autumn Project." Mara river, Kenya soundscape…
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It is around 11.00 pm at Malaika camp, Kenya. The sound of the river is always present. Different types of birds are singing. Hippos are aroung the area and can be heard. Also in a distance lions calling each other can be heard (7'10) At the end of the attached video you can see the river Mara in the daylight and a hippo coming into the river, reco…
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A unique recording in the kitchen at Bremen Bonbon Manufaktur, as sweet-making maestro Luca takes us through the process of making sweets by hand, including heating up mixtures, adding sugar, manipulating the still-warm ropes of sugary candy into the right shapes, chopping them down to size and more. An aural record of a traditional - and delicious…
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"I love port sounds and this had so much more. An untuned bell and a brass band too. I split the recording into four "stems" and then edited it down to 4 minutes, bounced them down then added some effects and some subtly detuning resonant bass." Aker Brygge harbour soundscape, Oslo reimagined by David Webb.…
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At Aker Brygge in Oslo, a tourist catamaran docks, we hear its engines throbbing as it manoeuvres into the dock. Passengers disembark under instruction from the crew, and all the while we hear the arhythmic bell chimes from the Untuned Bell sound installation to our right. Recorded by Cities and Memory, September 2025.…
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"I attached contact microphones to an empty tin of Monty Bojangles chocolates. I used it, together with some kitchen implements, to create the sounds of an imaginary sweet factory and resisted the temptation to process, or add effects to, my contact mic recordings. There are short extracts from the original recording at the beginning and end of my …
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This composition is a multi-layered synth improvisation, reacting in real time to the sounds of the breaking waves and calling birds in the field recording. Listening through to the full recording four or five times to immerse myself in the location, I then responded live to the recording on three passes with three separate synth sounds, allowing t…
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The rising tide, gently lapping at rocks, with the quieter general sound of the sea in the background. The recording contains many bird sounds – both land-based such as blackbirds (Turdus merula) and sea-based such as oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus). Recorded at dusk as the birds chorus before nightfall. Recorded at Tarskavaig on the Isle of…
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"The collective murmuring in the original recording filled me with comfort as soon as I heard it. There is something very nurturing about praying together and singing together in a beautiful resonate space. "It’s almost like the murmuring becomes a vast benevolent beast. This is an ode to the collective power of the voice, a huge hopeful entity mov…
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