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."
