Cities and Memory

Something exciting is coming from Cities and Memory on Monday - make sure you’re on the email list to hear about our latest major project first 👀

Happy 8️⃣th birthday (!) to one of my personal favourite projects, Sound Photography! 🔊📸 Sound Photography is the biggest ever worldwide artistic interaction between photographers and sound artists, covering 34 countries and six continents with sound pieces inspired by photographs. It asks - what is the relationship between photography and sound? In today’s visually-dominated culture, how can we use sound to respond to what we see around us? I really love how this project brought together photographers and sound artists in such an interesting way, and it led to responses with a huge depth of imagination. I'd love to re-run this project some time in the future - should I? 🤨 The images in this little gallery from the project are: 1. Man in bar - Berlin, 📷 Diego Ayala 2. Zen bowls - 📷 Dylan Thomas 3. Garage - Indianapolis, 📷 Dena Tasse-Winter 4. Vaporetto - Venice, 📷 Giulia Biasibetti 5. Balloons - New York State, 📷 Lauren Pond 6. Tramlines - San Francisco, 📷 Cities and Memory 7. Power station - Sheffield, 📷 Alan Silvester 8. Shimbashi station - Tokyo, 📷 Michael Lilley 9. Tiananmen Square - China, 📷 Scott Wilson 10. Fireworks - Somerset, 📷 Sarmisthar Talukdar #photography #soundart #soundphotography

What can the incredible frame gong teach us about how to listen better in our everyday lives? @dameevelynglennie and Stuart from @citiesandmemory talk about how this amazing instrument responds best to subtlety and curiosity - and how we can apply those principles to listening to other people. Our Ways of Listening project with @theevelynglenniefoundation is open for YOUR creative interpretations of listening until 19 June - find out more via the link in our bio. And the Listen Up exhibition runs @citylit until 18 May! // #listening #deeplistening #sound #gong #callforartists

I’m excited to let you know about a new feature we’re launching today - Cities and Memory radio is here! 📻 💕 Tuning into the bespoke Cities and Memory radio player, you can enjoy an uninterrupted flow of more than 8,000 sounds and reimagined pieces from across more than 140 countries, and curate your listening by project or sound type. The sounds are presented in pairs, so you can listen to a field recording followed immediately by the recomposed version of that sound. Whether you’re working in the office or relaxing at home, tune into a stream of beautiful, fascinating recordings and reimagined artistic inspiration, and discover sounds you had no idea were buried deep inside the Cities and Memory project. It’s a great way to start exploring what we’re all about - or to uncover the hidden depths of our vast archive of sounds. Find it at citiesandmemory.com/radio - enjoy! // #fieldrecording #sound #radio #soundart

A wonderful evening at the launch of Listen Up! from @theevelynglenniefoundation at @citylit last night. Fascinating conversations about listening - and on display for the next two weeks are some of the beautiful responses we’ve already received for our Ways of Listening project, from video and poetry to photography and painting. If you’re in London before 18 May stop by and check it out - you can also play some of the incredible instruments from Evelyn’s collection for yourselves. // #listening #deeplistening #fieldrecording #londonexhibition #sound

We’re excited to present our latest project to the world today, as Flow is presented at the EGU general assembly in Vienna, the biggest geoscience conference in Europe. Working with the University of Padova @unipd and the University of Würzburg @uniwuerzburg , Flow tells the story of a river through sound, from its source to its end. Flow combines science, sound, and imagery to bring to life the story of the river Lech, which flows through Austria and Germany, as an example representing all rivers, all over the world. Researchers at the University of Padua and the University of Würzburg collected satellite images, research, photography and field recordings from the entire length of the river, and asked artists to reimagine the life of the river through sound. You can hear the results by heading to citiesandmemory.com/flow // #fieldrecording #river #soundart #soundscapes #lech

🎧💕 A special Cities and Memory collaboration with @addressapproximate to share today with you all - here’s a piece we worked on for the Spring Project, from Oldenburg, Germany. Through the golden evening sunshine, this local market closing down for the evening was tinged with a certain feeling of sweet melancholy, as another day winds down. Using the chimes of the bells as a rhythmic centre, locked in time with a piano part, I created this piece to evoke the mood I felt while making the recording. And yet in the spacious ambience left between the dominant melodic parts of the track, it felt like there was something missing - like there was a story to be told about the scene and about Oldenburg, but I didn’t have the words. Cristina Marras has been contributing her wonderful spoken word storytelling to Cities and Memory for a number of years, so I decided to approach her to see if the piece inspired her to tell that story - and her brilliant work really completes the piece. Cristina said: “The piece came from the feeling of passing through a foreign city and catching accidental glimpses of other people’s lives: a woman at a bus stop, a window seen from a train. Fragments of worlds we enter without being invited, and leave without being noticed.” We hope you enjoy it - and you can find the full piece on the Cities and Memory sound map! // #fieldrecording #soundart #oldenburg #germany #soundscapes

We’re proud to launch the third and final volume in our Echoes for Palestine series today on @bandcamp Friday - every penny you donate today by buying the album goes to @hope_and_play_charity and their amazing work with children in Palestine and Gaza. Find it at the link in our bio 🇵🇸❤️🖤💚 Huge thanks to all of the artists who contributed their time, energy and creativity to helping us support this amazing charity, to @deepdivesound for his tireless enthusiasm in assembling the collection, and to everyone who reached into their pockets to back this project, from Volume 1 to today. Echoes for Palestine, Volume 3 marks the closing chapter of this global series — but not the feeling behind it. It remains, and will always remain, a tender artistic gesture of solidarity and compassion for the children of Gaza and the West Bank. Carrying the same intention and empathy that shaped the previous volumes, this final chapter turns further inward — into more experimental realms. Moving beyond genre, a new constellation of works from artists around the world emerges, drifting into electroacoustic and acousmatic territories — where sound sheds its attachment to form and becomes gesture, texture, and presence. Here, sound resists simply by existing freely. By holding space for harmony as much as noise. From breath-driven wind instruments carrying distant echoes of فلسطين, to fractured sonic narratives where grief and grace coexist; from the dense noise of decayed tapes, where silence holds as much weight as sound, to field recordings dissolving into a low hum of tension — each piece feels like a trace calling for change, where listening becomes an act of resistance. Across these 25 tracks, a living cartography of sound unfolds — raw, intimate, and unguarded. Together, they form a space that is fragile, yet unbroken. Because even here — especially here — hope endures. The cover artwork was generously gifted by illustrator Burla Manu, whose vision quietly holds the spirit of this work. \\ #bandcampfriday #fundraiser #palestine #gaza freepalesti̇ne

🎧💕 New work on the sound map from Paris! As one of the world’s most famous sacred spaces, Notre Dame in Paris has a very particular effect even on the non-religious, perhaps close to Stendhal Syndrome. But it’s not just about the space itself, it’s about sharing that awe with thousands of other people concurrently, as an endless snaking line of people enters the space, each to have their own significant experience, whether it’s of secular beauty or sacred majesty. The drone of shuffling feet and low conversation, amplified by thousands of people in such a huge space, can be sonically overwhelming, however. In this piece, I wanted to transform that hubbub created by the presence of people into something that did greater justice to the majesty of the location, a kind of ambient sonic offering back to the physical space in Notre Dame. Here, the background hum of people becomes an ambient pulse that magnifies attention rather than distracting from it, while the periodic reminders to “shhhh” and be silent punctuate the piece as a constant reminder of the presence of control and administration, even as we communally share an all too rare moment of the sacred. The piece is a magnification of the type of attention we only pay when we are shocked out of ourselves by beauty, and by scale. \\ #fieldrecording #soundart #ambient #paris #notredame

Happy #WorldBookDay! 📚 To mark this global celebration of reading, we’ve updated our essential guide to books for sound recordists, musicians, listeners and creatives. From field recording bibles by Bernie Krause and R. Murray Schafer to meditations on listening by Pauline Oliveiros, through to literary works that have opened creative doors for us, like Invisible Cities or The Book of Legendary Lands, we hope you’ll find something to inspire you! Explore the full collection via the link in our bio and happy reading 📖💕 Our latest addition to the library: 1 - Transcendent Waves by Lavender Suarez 2 - Ears to the Ground by Ben Murphy 3 - Uneasy Listening by Anouchka Grose and Robert Brewer Young 4 - Seesongs by Rosaire Appel 5 - The Art of Noise by Russolo, Pratella et al. Featured authors: @davidjhendy @dada_drummer @wildsanctuary @rappelx @trevorjcox7 @anouchkagrose @robertbreweryoung @davidgeorgehaskell @casparhenderson @stuarthyatt @anguscarlyle @lavenderhealer @michaela_vieser @utter_earth

Here’s a special message from @dameevelynglennie , as there are now just TWO MONTHS left to take part in our special project Ways of Listening. Over the past few months, with so many submissions already sent it, Ways of Listening has grown into something rich, surprising, and deeply human. What’s striking isn’t just the range of sounds submitted, but the range of approaches to listening itself. Taken together, the submissions form a kind of map — not of places, but of attention. Again and again, artists return to a simple but powerful idea: listening is not passive. It is something we do. So what does listening mean to YOU? We can’t wait to see -and hear - your creative responses to the question. Find out more and get involved via the link in our bio // #deeplistening #opencall #callforartists #listening #sound

🚨 Two months to go! 🚨 You have until 19 June to answer one simple question - what does listening mean to you? Ways of Listening - a partnership between @citiesandmemory and @dameevelynglennie @theevelynglenniefoundation - is a global multidisciplinary callout for artists from all disciplines and backgrounds to create a conversation around listening. You can submit a creative response to the question in whichever medium you like - we’re welcoming poetry, prose, video and film, photography, drawing and painting, sculpture, dance, field recording, sound and music. Find out more and submit your response to Ways of Listening via the link in our bio - and please do share our call with your friends, colleagues and networks! 💖 // #opencall #callforartists #deeplistening #listening #sound