Soundcities.....

The new project is finally finished. This uses found sound from world cities made over the last three years and to be released soon. But all the sounds will be put online on the web.

I have spent the last year travelling to over fifteen worldwide cities. During this time I have collected and recorded the sounds from these cities. I also took thousands of photos. I have been to sao paolo, london, paris, dresden, amsterdam, saltburg, graz, rotterdam, barcelona, san sebastian, manchester, liverpool, ljubiana, frankfurt porto, istanbul, mexico, chicago.

I have built the prototype mixing desk and now I have to scan in the images, arrange the sounds and build the website. So I have most of the technology in place for the first version. I am now building a version of sound cities that will allow users to save the mixes they make and upload them on to the database area where other people can listen to the results. When this happens a growing labyrinth a community of aural cityscapes and collages will evolve.

The website is a series on online mixing desks with visuals from these places. The will represent idealized aural spaces from these cities mapped onto the virtual world. Fused to this will be visual collages indentifying specifics of architecture, environment and the people.

I am interested in the sounds of specific places, and how the sounds reflect this identity and re-impose characteristics back onto the location or environment. 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. The sounds of language impose a rhythm that the visual narrative can interact with. The aim is to create an audio visual experience that evokes place, both as literal description but also developed musical composition.

These sounds also give clues to the emotional and responsive way we interact with our cities. The sounds of cities evoke memories and as globilisation fractures our images of specific locations we find things that appeat the same the worldover. Rather than make a fixed artwork like an installation or cdrom the ideas is to make a website that is permanently evolving as an artwork for the public to enage and intertact with.

I have now finished the linear mix that are online as mp3 soundcities.