Cities And Memory

I joined the project late and so this was one of the only remaining sounds - The Bwiadogan Kadede from Goodenough Island chose me, recorded by anthropologist Diamond Jenness. I was delighted because this randomness fits with my experimental approach to creating music. But I became increasingly concerned with the disconnect between this project and the people who live in the place the sound was collected from. Could I, a complete outsider, a person with no knowledge of Goodenough Island, its people, land or culture, use this sound in a way that wouldn’t reproduce Jenness’s racism and hubris?I did some digging in Jenness’s writing, particularly The Northern D’Entrecasteaux and Language, Mythology and Songs of Bwaidoga, to try and get a better understanding of the song’s lyrics and meaning, but all I really know about it is that it’s a dance song where singers are arranged in parallel rows. I joined a Goodenough Islanders Facebook group to ask if anyone knew about the song and to express my gratitude for having

I chose this field recording because I liked that it’s a documentation of someone imitating the music of nature. In that original recording itself there’s so many layers of the art. There’s the birdsong that the person presumably heard many times, then spent time learning how to make the whistling sound, then they made their song, which was recorded onto magnetic tape, and converted into a digital format, which finally reached me. It made me think about at what point something becomes art. In my composition, I featured the field recording mostly untouched, but I added elements that also comment on when something can be considered art. There’s the sound of a flag flapping against a pole, of which I liked the rhythmic and melodic gentle clinking. There’s the sound of a tuning fork, which I usually consider not to be a musical instrument but rather a tool used before the music is made. There’s sounds of me whistling based on my memory of the original field recording, which I felt more comfortable manipulating t

U'wa group chant from the Andes in north-east Colombia.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of U'wa songs and stories made by anthropologist Ann Osborn in the Northern Andes (Sierra Nevada del Cocuy region) in Colombia between 1969 and 1977.Recorded by Ann Osborn.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

When approaching a project like this I try to come up with a concept quickly - the immediacy of ideas is what makes most sense to me. To me, the sample reminded me of people rapping, and the flow of the original sample seemed to ask for some accompanying electronic instrumentation to give them centre stage. I tried three different approaches and stitched them together - the first part lends itself more to ambient listening, turning the vocals more into an instrument - and the second and third parts would be more at home in a club. I included parts of the sample where the people are also talking/expressing themselves to make it feel like a live jam - that they were also in the room. I think the restriction of not understanding the lyrics can also be an advantage - as the vocals can be used more like an instrument and listeners can focus on the tonality and flow of the words.U'wa group chant reimagined by Richard Corke.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from t

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous individual recordings.Unknown recordist.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

"Six Records of Gongs and Singing": six phonograph records of drums and singing from Vanuatu, originally recorded on wax cylinders by anthropologist John Layard, later transferred (here) to tape.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous or individual ethnographic field recordings (rediscovered during a recent research project).Recorded by John Willoughby Layard.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

I decided to reimagine the recording of “Six Records of Gongs and Singing”: six phonograph records of drums and singing. Originally recorded in 1914 on Atchin Island in Vanuatu, these recordings were made using wax cylinders by anthropologist John Willoughby Layard. Later, in the late 1930s, they were transferred to 78rpm records, and in 1979, they were transferred to reel-to-reel tape.In my recording of “Aural Sunbeam (Six Records of Gongs and Singing),” I am reinterpreting these historical sounds to capture the essence of the museum’s recording. My objective is to create a captivating narrative and sonic experience that may enhance a listener’s engagement with this remarkable historical artifact through our shared cultural memory. I believe that culturally significant artifacts that hold historical narratives can be used to gain new insights into the past.My interest in preserving the music is equally important to me as the voice of anthropologist John Willoughby Layard in these recordings. For me, it deep

U'wa whistling from the Andes in north-east Colombia.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of U'wa songs and stories made by anthropologist Ann Osborn in the Northern Andes (Sierra Nevada del Cocuy region) in Colombia between 1969 and 1977.Recorded by Ann Osborn.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

As a starting point for this project, I did some research into the person who played the barrel organs on the recording.It transpired that Freddy Hill (born 1932 in Sussex, UK) was a very gifted man. The son of a headmaster and a clockmaker by profession, he also taught carpentry and music and was an expert restorer of antique musical instruments including the chamber barrel organs in this recording. Freddy was a founder member of the Musical Box Society of Great Britain which was established in 1962. The three barrel organs being played here were built between 1764 and 1850, and the recordings were made in April 1967 after Freddy’s repairs and restoration. Most of the sounds on this 42-minute recording are of Freddy speeding through the barrel organ cylinders to check functionality, however the "Morning Hymn’"and "Evening Hymn" sections are played through at a nice pace and stood out to me, so I extracted these as the base for my work. After a number of abandoned approaches, rather than “reinterpret” the so

The recording I started with came with a description, which included the following phrase: "youths [...] drum on trees as they pass through the forest, sometimes spirits may drum the tree during boyobé ceremonies."I was keen to both explore the rhythms and that sense of being joined by spirits - the ambiguity about who plays; as much in the lack of information about the actual individuals as in a spiritual way.A photograph of these "youths" by one of the trees became a guiding image as I stretched sounds, resampled, chopped and rearranged, all the while trying to find the spirit both of and beyond the rhythm. Eventually these original and new patterns, skipping and jolting through an imaginary forest - meeting, somehow, across time - coalesced into this piece of music.Gooma (tree drum) played with sticks reimagined by de Velden.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full proj

Excerpts from expedition tapes: recording of songs and the playing of musical instruments in the northern part of the Oriente of Ecuador made by members of the Oxford University Expedition to Ecuador in 1960.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous or individual ethnographic field recordings (rediscovered during a recent research project).Recorded by Michael R. Emerson and Ralph Hudson Johnson.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Barrel organs: recording of three English barrel organs in the Pitt Rivers Museum's collections, comprising songs played by Freddy Hill (restorer).From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a small number of recordings of the musical instruments in the institution's collections being played or discussed.Unknown recordist. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

"The horn sounds like this" originates from a December 1966 reel tape recording featuring musicologist Jeremy Montague demonstrating various horns. The 30-minute document represents a specific moment in museological practice: a scholarly voice explaining before sounding, contextualising before experiencing.Rather than preserving the integrity of this material, Francesco Ganassin and Sergio Marchesini chose the path of creative betrayal. Montague's voice and the demonstrated horn sounds are subjected to a process of corruption that reveals hidden dimensions while obscuring others. The horn demonstrations bleed into one another, traveling through layers of digital memory that fail and distort. The narration fragments and becomes repetition and then texture. "The horn sounds like this" lives through sonic paradoxes. It is elementary as the sound production techniques of the horns themselves, urban as the background noise of a nocturnal city, minimal as a badly-tuned radio transmission, truculent as a piece hear

"Trumpets and horns": narration by musicologist Jeremy Montague about the contents of the trumpets display in the Pitt Rivers Museum, with examples of instruments being played.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a small number of recordings of the musical instruments in the institution's collections being played or discussedUnknown recordist.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the moment that I first heard this sound, I thought the flute sounded very much like a little steam train. At first, I researched about Columbian trains and found there is a tourist train to the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá, an underground Roman Catholic church built within the tunnels of a salt mine, 200 metres (660 ft) underground in a halite mountain near the city of Zipaquirá, in Cundinamarca, Colombia.I wanted the listener to hear the original recording in the track but did edit the order, tempo and pitch to give an idea of the effort of the train on its journey. I then added a rhythmic synth line to give a feeling of travel and sourced some steam train sounds from freesound. Towards the end of the track I layered other synth lines and a church organ as the train reaches its destination, the salt cathedral. However, the more I worked on the track, It brought back memories of a journey I made many years ago on the little train that takes people up Yr Wyddfa. So a little nod to this is the tune to Hen

This piece for the Century of Sound project began with a single field recording drawn from the archive of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Rather than this recurring functioning as an objective document of place or event, I approached the recording as a temporal fracture, a sound that had already been severed from the moment that produced it. I was inspired by the thought that a recording is made not to preserve presence, but to register our disappearance and that an archive does not store the past intact, it stores its decaying remains. Thus all recorded sound is hauntological, and exists as an audible ghost or spectral presence of something or someone, the reanimation of the past as a memory becoming a new memory and so on, each time changing its perception. The record I used carried voices and environmental details (mostly of work activities) that no longer exist, yet through the recording can never fully vanish, as sound has folded time back on itself.The entire composition is derived from this single arc

This is about feeling that you don’t know enough to handle something properly. It’s built from samples of the opening horn blast, but what really interested me was the surrounding story: a group of explorers and botanists’ attempt to climb the active, glaciated volcano Antisana; they surveyed the forests up to the snowline, and the northern and western ice tongues, but were cut short when the snow bridge ahead collapsed and made the route impassable. I was particularly taken with a cut-off confession, an admission of some mistake almost but not quite captured on tape. It was most likely some small nothing, but it suggested the content of the song.Excerpts from expedition tapes reimagined by Earthly Years.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Loprimoi, a Laarim elder, recounts the history of his people, with the sound of blacksmiths working, hammering metal, nearby.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of cassette tape recordings of music and spoken language (principally Laarim) made by anthropologist Patti Langton in South Sudan during 1979 and 1980.Recorded by Patti Langton.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of Chocó music and soundscapes made by students Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith in Colombia in 1965.Recorded by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds