text and photos from http://www.soundcities.com a project by Stanza http://www.stanza.co.uk
"This
interactive website called soundcities.com allows the audience as
creative user the possibility to remix the hundreds of samples recorded
from around the worldon various soundmaps. Soundcities is an open online
database of the thousands of sounds from around the world and you can
visits the various cities and create soundmaps.. The website also has
series on online mixing desks where you can mix these sounds.
Soundcities uses city recorded soundscapes from world cities.
Soundcities
was the first online open source database of city sounds and soundmaps
from around the world, using found sounds and field recording. There are
now thousands of sounds from around the world on the website. The
concept started in 1995 with various iterations. In 1996 Stanza devised
the term soundmaps and intitiated the varios works that developed into
soundcities.comStanza's soundmaps have been online since 2000 and the
Soundcities database since 2004. This project allows the audience the
possibility to remix the hundreds of samples recorded from cities around
the world in an online database. The sounds can be listened to, used in
performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks.The
Database is also open so anyone can upload sounds they collect from
world cities, thereby making a contribution to the project and making an
online sounds archive.
The sounds of cities also give
clues to the emotional and responsive way we interact with our cities.
Cities all have specific identities, and found sound can give us clues
to the people that inhabit these spaces, as well as provoking us and
stimulating our senses in a musical way. I am interested in the sounds
of specific places, and how the sounds reflect this identity and
re-imposes characteristics back onto the location or environment. The
aim is to create an online aural experience that evokes place, both as
literal description but also developed musical composition. The sounds
of cities evoke memories. As globalization fractures the identity of the
city experience we start to find things that appear the same the world
over.
A growing labyrinth, a community of aural
cityscapes and collages is now evolving.The nature of the sounds and
noise of cities varies in tone and language. A background rhythm can
come into the foreground. It mixes itself, and evolves. The city is its
own music, constantly evolving, a beautiful composition of squeaks,
clanks, and pulses we compose this orchestra as we move about. We
control the interface of the city as we navigate the streets. We are
familiar but distracted as it bombards our conscious slipstream. The
sounds evolve, generate, move, die, fade and shift. The sounds of the
city are out there all the time, there is no silence. The children, the
trains, the drills, the animals, the micro sounds, the sounds of our
bodies, the sounds of the street, the insides of our souls. Familiar
forms, identities and sounds are common to all cities, and yet each have
special forms that separate and identity particular places and spaces.
The
city is the orchestra. As globalization fractures the identity of the
city experience we start to find things that appear the same the world
over. Soundcities, involves field recording literally the sounds we hear
as we walk out of the door. Not just as noise (data) or as noise
pollution but also as an appreciation of sound and how this not only
affects the space but is the space.The noise is the city, the noise is
the music, the city is the orchestra and we are just conductors whose
interactive actions compose this music as we walk around. We control the
interface of the city as we navigate the streets. We are responsive in
out interactions of the city space."