Cities And Memory

This is the first edition of a recording I've made in the 2024 summer afternoon at the beach. It was made at Praia Vermelha (Red Beach), Urca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a hot weather, the beach was crowded: children, families, young and elder people, vendors selling drinks and refreshments (water, cold mate, coconut water, popsicle, and so on). People are talking, laughing, shouting. Waves are breaking continuously on the sand.  Recorded in Rio de Janeiro by Marcelo Carneiro de Lima.

"The sound of a train in the distance on a quiet beautiful morning makes me think of possibility and freedom. But I was thinking about how others may hear something different, or it might not be a positive association for everyone, depending on how free you are, or what's truly possible. In the old days I had an idea of America and its wide open spaces as a place where people were free and everything was possible. Maybe it still is and maybe it never was.  "There's a little musical sound, some kind of alarm maybe, that I brought into the piano part. The sound isn't quite tuned to the notes of the piano, and you can hear it in slightly different keys, and as major or minor. I tried to build on that sound to create a thread through the music, but use the ambiguity it creates to allow a couple of changes of direction, between uncertainty, hopefulness, and melancholy."  Savannah Garden City soundscape reimagined by Andrew Hayes.

It’s early morning in what seems to be a quiet suburb of Georgia. People are still asleep, but you the rumble of industry never stops, cars flying down nearby highways and the signalling and occasional hoots of trains passing through. The birds wake up and follow suit.  Garden City is a city is known for its industrial hub and proximity to the Port of Savannah. The rumble of trains reminds you of this in the early morning in what would appear to be a very leafy suburb, with long verges, and tall trees.  I spent a few nights in Savannah Garden City while visiting Savannah during Autumn 2023.  Recorded by Marg Laing.

"This piece struck me because of the background drone of echoed speech and mechanical sounds with some melodic content (possibly an elevator chime, since looking into the site I found that the Hannover Rathaus has a well-known arched elevator that curves with the dome of the building).  "I built the fundamentals of the piece around those notes and some audible German and English phrases, including the unlikely phrase that serves as the piece’s title. Somehow during the process, I got the notion that this was a Christmas ghost story; some of the wall of noise in the middle section is made up of a drowned spoken word piece, from a “cut-up” of the snippets of speech in the original field recording and phrases from my research into the location." Neues Rathaus, Hannover reimagined by John Savarese.

A soundwalk around the heavily-reverbed impressive interior of Hannover's Neues Rathaus. Huge, reverby echo caused by the voices and footsteps of just a few visitors.  Recorded by Cities and Memory, May 2025. 

"Scotland has always had a strong pull on my imagination and I've always wanted to visit. This sound file was my first choice from the many offered by Cities & Memory for their Autumn Project. Coincidentally, this past summer, while vacationing with my family in Assateague, Virginia, I made a recording of the ocean shore while standing on the beach. When I began the Autumn Project, I decided to use both as a sort of bridge between my real life in the United States and my imagined life in Scotland.  "Most of the music here was from an ambient piece I came up with during a Sunday morning session a week or two ago. My working title for it was Midnight Mariner. Other sonic elements added for this new piece evoke the bell of a buoy rolling in the waves, the ethereal singing of the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, and a muffled, indistinct drum pattern that sounds as if it is being played underwater.  "This submission was composed/assembled on my iPad inside the host software app AUM. I used a variety of iOS

A dawn soundscape in the heart of Vietnam’s lowland forest, where the awakening of countless birds marks the start of a new day. The air fills with the diverse chorus of chirps, calls, and rustling, as various species gradually come to life. Cat Tien Park, Vietnam recorded by Rafael Diogo.

"For this remix, I pulled out the most musical fragments of the original, like the bicycle bells, and turned them into looping motifs, then built an entirely new drum and bass track beneath them. I also reshaped the vocal sample into another loop and wove in select sound effects, like the crowd noise and a car starting, to preserve the atmosphere while giving the piece a fresh identity." Drum and bass at the 420 parade, Vienna reimagined by Rebecca Goldberg.

This is the recording I made by complete accident - we were coming back home with my girlfriend and when we came out of the metro station we heard loud music from behind, so we went to see what it was. I remembered that I'd seen the posters around town about the Drum and Bass on Bike event, which was supposed to be in support of the general 420 parade (cannabis legalization movement in general), and that was it. I quickly turned on my Tascam recorder and recorded what I could, as it was quite an unusual soundscape for the area and the time. Recorded in Vienna, Austria by Tomasz Buga.

This is a brief recording in May 2022 of the music from Jane's Carousel in Brooklyn, NY. I was just looking up the history of the Merry-Go-Round, which was built in 1922 for the Idora Park amusement park in Youngstown, Ohio. So, by sheer coincidence this recording was made 100 years after the creation of the carousel. Recorded in Brooklyn, New York by Bill McKenna.

"Resampled bit of carousel from my former home of Brooklyn gets a new life as this plaintive melody." Carousel in Brooklyn, New York reimagined by Anne Pope.

The March of Light 2025 (Ukraine Support Demonstration in Vienna)  This recording illustrates one of the crucial parts of the March of Light demonstration, which is basically a flash mob based on people showing and hiding their phones with flashlights turned on, which is then shared on social media to draw people's attention to the whole event, which is to support Ukraine in its war against its aggressor - the Russian Federation. The video with the results of this flash mob can be found on the Instagram of mrija_org. The sounds in the recording are people raising and lowering their hands, and also people talking, cheering and chanting the most popular phrase "Slava Ukraini, Heroyam Slava" ("Glory to Ukraine, Glory to Heroes"). Recorded in Vienna, Austria by Tomasz Buga.

"The original field recording captures a street choir singing hymns. I transformed this material by processing it into dense, evolving layers of sound. One layer stretches the recording in time and feeds it through the Elta Music Solar 42F, allowing the choral textures to dissolve into a shimmering, otherworldly drone.  "The result is a slow-moving, contemplative, and meditative soundscape that reimagines the choir’s presence in a new sonic frame." Ukrainian Easter celebration in Vienna reimagined by Thomas Haighton.

"The bird sounds of this recording have a particular cadence and repetition. It inspired me to create something that was more solid and continuous to accompany it. I created a drone composed of 4 sounds that intertwine with each other progressively.  "This piece contains a binaural base frequency of 3.2 Hz so it is encouraged to listen on earphones to get the optimum effect. The piece is also tuned to 432Hz. And I played a Erhu on top of it. I mixed it very wide for a very profound and immersive listening experience.  "I loved creating this ambiance feeling how it would be to be one of these birds living and flying through Asia.' Cat Tien Park, Vietnam reimagined by Tamara Montenegro.

Inside a sea cave on a Cornish beach, recording dripping waves on different surfaces and at different distances, onto rock, into small puddles and directly onto sand, while the roar of the sea waves continues outside the cave.  Recorded in Mawgan Porth, Cornwall, England by Cities and Memory, April 2025. 

Cicadas and katydids singing in Dingmans Ferry, Pennsylvania, 9 Aug 2013. This is a recording of the intense sounds of cicadas and katydids singing in the deep night. The recording was made using two condenser microphones in stereo array through a Mackie 12 track board directly to digital.  Recorded by Dan Bodah.

"Salt water reverberations and soundscapes are a daily and necessary embodied element of my life by and on the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara, Southern California. As a woman from Britain living in SoCal, I connect with the sea caves sounds in Mawgan Porth, Cornwall, England, being soothed and inspired by the rhythms, pitches, textures, and timbres of water drops, accompanied by the constant roar outside the sea caves.  "With Cornish marine sounds I have added my daily ocean soundscapes: slaps of waves on my coastal rowing boat; sea lions barking on bell buoy (slightly muted by the bodies of sea lions bodies) marking the safe harbor entrance; a train on the nearby shore; little Ourn, a homemade 18-foot wooden sailing boat built in 1931 by a 15-year old lad from Eling, Southampton, England, splashing through the waves at 5 knots in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara (and low-tech wind sounds without a wind screen to reminder listeners that sail boats by necessity play with wind power).  "Perhaps these aqua

"For this year’s Autumn Project, I was excited to have the opportunity to work with a sample collected near my original home.  "“An Intense Calling” is field-recording-based piece based on a recording of cicadas and katydids in Dingman’s Ferry, PA collected by Dan Bodah. Growing up near the Delaware Water Gap on the other side in New Jersey, I was excited to think about both the feelings this recordings evoked in me, my memories of when I’ve heard the cicadas. I’ve combined this with my own recording of cicadas taken in NJ in Summer 2025 to create a conversation between the original sample and my experiences. I used additional field recordings that evoke my place-based memories, vocalizations on the lifecycle of cicadas, the idea that cicada sound can be both overwhelming and melodic, and potential conversations between broods to create the final piece. The title of this piece references both the aforementioned overwhelming experience of the cicadas and my own pull towards creating/capturing/manipulating sou

"As soon as I heard the drum recording, I wanted to do something with it in the spirit of break chopping/dj tools. I love lots of 70s/80s/early 90s straight sample flips & it was an unusual opportunity to try something similar without butting up against copyright issues.  "I chopped up the recording, added a little in the way of effects, and supplemented a simple electro beat.  "I enjoy listening to it, & for me it's reminiscent of weaving through the energy of the very same square with my brother in my late teens, over-caffeinated from the delicious coffee they served in the cafes overlooking it." Marrakech traditional musicians reimagined by Andrew Tulloch.

Possibly the most visited spot on Skye are the Fairy Pools, a long chain of pools and small waterfalls coming down from the mountains - a truly stunning spot. We visit after most tourists have left, at around 8pm in the evening, to capture some close-up sound recordings without the presence of tourists.  Recorded in Skye, Scotland by Cities and Memory, April 2025.