Cities and Memory - remixing the world

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of Berber (Ait Haddidu) music and soundscapes made by members of the Oxford University Expedition to the Atlas Mountains of Southern Morocco in 1961.

Recorded by Audrey Butt, Michael R. Emerson or Ralph Hudson Johnson.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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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 cassette tape recordings of songs and instruments made by playwright David Mowat across several different states in India during 1987.

Recorded by David Mowat.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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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

Airwaves Unfolded is a piece based on a radio recording produced in the 1960s in Tarija, southern Bolivia, by Radio Universidad de Tarija. The program introduces Indigenous instruments and discusses how they have been intertwined with labour, daily life, and ritual, as well as how new instruments and musical forms developed after Spanish influence.

What drew me to this recording were the instruments’ unstable yet resonant tones alongside the narrator’s voice. The voice carries a sense of responsibility, warmth, and quiet pride, reflecting an intention to preserve cultural knowledge and pass it on to future generations. Although the broadcast was created for its own present moment, it now reaches us as a fragment of cultural memory. I approached the recording not as a fixed historical document, but as material whose meaning can continue to shift over time.

In the process of making the piece, I extracted short fragments of narration and placed them alongside the instrumental sounds to explore new relationships between them. Heavy processing was avoided, with an emphasis on preserving the instruments’ resonance, pitch fluctuations, and texture as they appear in the original recording.

The piano serves as a primary, foregrounded presence throughout the piece, while its recording captures the room’s resonance and ambient qualities as a field-recorded sound. The piano is played using scales and harmonies chosen to closely complement the original sounds, acting as a quiet foundation for the piece. The original radio programme fragments are placed within this piano texture, allowing the voices of the past and the present performance to intertwine gently.

During the production process, I also researched the instruments featured in the programme and their historical and social contexts. While engaging with a field recording from a culture different from my own, I continued to reflect on what I am actually hearing and what I may be imagining. Airwaves Unfolded takes shape as a space in which voices from the past gently touch the present.

Bolivian radio programme on folk music reimagined by Masako Yokouchi (Sonotant).

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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

"Bolivian radio programme on folk music": a recording of folk music from southern Bolivia issued by Radio Universidad de Tarija, with commentary (in Spanish).

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a small number of recordings issued or released by foreign broadcasting corporations or radio associations.

Recorded by Radio Universidad de Tarija.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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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

Momboli and Gongé playing flutes in the forest at night.

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.

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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 field recording from India immediately revealed itself to me as a form of male ritual music, rooted in repetition, gesture, and collective memory. From that first encounter, the piece began to take shape as an inner journey: a passage through listening, silence, and transformation.

The opening unfolds in a dreamlike, immersive space, imagined as a temple. Here, sound becomes a threshold. Together with Spanish sound artist Sara Broto, I shaped — through my flute — a dialogue around one of her poems, almost a prayer, where voice and breath trace a return to origins, to something ancient and essential. This meditative atmosphere gradually evolves into an evocative Indian mantra by Alessia Ronge, acting as a bridge between contemplation and embodiment.

The mantra is then carried forward by the fluid, almost aquatic textures of Antonio Aiello’s double bass, alongside the synthesizer work and mixing by Giuseppe Lacinskij Schillaci. Through a slow and carefully sculpted crescendo, these elements open the way to the rhythmic core of the piece: the field recording itself. At this point, the music shifts from inward reflection to outward movement, inviting the body into dance and tribal motion.

Before composing, I conducted additional research into Indian soundscapes and various forms of ritual music, allowing their structures, functions, and symbolic dimensions to inform my approach. After the encounter and fusion between the musicians and the original recording, I made a conscious decision to preserve the field recording in its integrity. Rather than transforming it, I chose to frame it — to let its pulse speak for itself.

The resulting composition is conceived as a spiritual trajectory. It begins with a poetic prayer, passes through mantra, and arrives at a communal, rhythmic space. It is a journey of release, where sound becomes a tool for reconnection and self-healing, and where listening opens the possibility of letting go.

Cristina Italiani – flute, composition
Sara Broto – poetry, voice, soundscape
Alessia Ronge – mantra, voice, harmonium
Antonio Aiello – double bass
Giuseppe Lacinskij Schillaci – synth, mix

Men singing, with percussion and violin reimagined by Cristina Italiani.

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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 was delighted to work with the recording of Aka masters Momboli and Gongé, playing flutes in the forest at night, recorded by Louis Sarno in the 1990s. I decided to retain the essence of the sounds of the forest camp at night, including the community of women, men, and children, as well as the wild shouts that are often parts of these moments.

 For many years, I have wished to visit the Congo, including the Dzanga-Sangha, and immerse myself among the Bayaka people. With this opportunity presented by the Century of Sounds project, I envisioned a composition that reflects this long-held dream. I decided to create a dreamscape. Perhaps I am dreaming while sleeping in one of the shelters within the forest camp? Or am I dreaming from a faraway country, caught between two worlds?

The concept of a dreamscape was reinforced after listening to an interview with Louis Sarno on the Pitt Rivers Museum Vimeo channel. Sarno describes how Bayaka mbyo flute music can be experienced in dreams, and that the songs are often received in dreams. This insight confirmed that a dreamscape was the appropriate direction for my composition. Sarno also mentions that the sound of this flute no longer exists, as no one plays the flute anymore.
 
The breathing of the dreamer draws the listener within the sleeper’s dream, while a distant drum, perhaps a heartbeat or the pulsing of the forest, soothes and draws you deeper. For the final part of the composition, I improvised a flute part, playing with Momboli and Gongé. Joining these two masters across space and time was a privilege and honour, sharing a song, a highly-valued documentation of Aka culture.

“A Sound That No Longer Exists”: a dreamer is immersed in the sounds of the forest at night with Aka master flute players, Momboli and Gongé. Perhaps the dreamer is asleep in the forest camp, or in another country altogether, dreaming and connecting across the unconscious mind and the supernatural.

Breathing - laryngeal microphone.
Traditional African drums, rainstick, flute, small bells
Performed by Momboli and Gongé, and Vicki Hallett

Flutes in the forest at night reimagined by Vicki Hallett.

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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 source material that I worked with was a field recording from the 60s in which someone in Morocco is singing a song, begging for bread. When I first listened to the recording, it immediately brought back a very specific memory from an old workplace of mine – an energy company had made a typographical error on their website, and when their customers struggling with energy debts called the phone number for the company's hardship scheme, it reached the completely unrelated company where I worked. For about a week, I was answering the phone explaining to stressed people struggling to pay their energy bills that they had to hang up and call a very slightly different phone number to get the service they needed. When I tried to contact the energy company about their mistake, it was nigh-on impossible because they were largely using automated chatbots for their customer service. 

All of that influenced the atmosphere of this short track, and my decision to take the original recording and bury it amidst liminal-sounding distorted “call holding” music: even as our societies have ostensibly developed and evolved since the original recording was made - with technology and infrastructures becoming infinitely more complex - the same problems and tragic inequities continue on.

Ait Haddidu beggar singing for bread reimagined by Mute Branches.

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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

“Durei-na-mbwe 2.0” plays with notions of time, decay and transformation; with it, I wanted to capture the embodied experience of me listening to and imagining the original recording through a contemporary lens. I listened to the original Durei-na-mbwe by the Broken Consort (1961) on repeat for about three weeks before I started to work with it; the haunting melody of the vocals and panpipes became an earworm and, as I heard these sounds circulating in my head, they started to morph into additional layers of rhythms and harmonies.

I created my track entirely using samples of the original recording, which I have sampled, modified and rearranged using an Elektron Digitakt and the Granulator plug in in Ableton, with the aim of capturing and conveying what I could hear inside my head. My first step was to bring out the depth of the drums using EQ and resonators, whilst preserving the key qualities of the original recording, such as the crackle of the reel-to-reel and the roughness of the rhythm, and, at the same time, to transform the samples into something novel. I created a range of percussive elements, and I used a section of the vocals and panpipes to create a harmonic melody that evolves throughout the track. The resulting piece of music embodies (I hope) the energy of the Durei-na-mbwe performance, yet transformed by time and my own experience of it.

Durei-na-mbwe (song) by the Broken Consort reimagined by Kim[bal].
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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 archival field recordings of Bayaka hunters captured by Louis Sarno were the starting point of this work, not only for their sonic richness, but for their ability to convey life and presence across time. The voices, full of rhythm, laughter, and communal energy, immediately suggested the potential to create a composition that honours their vitality while exploring cross-boundary cultures and beliefs. Rather than reconstructing the historical narrative or fixing the recordings in their original context, I was inspired by the idea of non attachment to source: once recorded, sound can outlive its moment and enter new acoustic environments, where it can be reshaped and reimagined.

In creating Voices Through Wires, the Bayaka voices form the structural backbone of the piece, alongside ethereal Muslim calls. Their rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and vocal textures guided the pacing and form of the composition. I approached these recordings as living material, letting their natural flow dictate the layering and movement of the work. Rather than imposing an external structure, I followed the inherent pulse of the voices, allowing the composition to emerge organically, with short layered beats on the drum machine and esoteric synth textures creating the bed for the overall soundscape.

Alongside the Bayaka material, I integrated field recordings from my travels in North Africa and vocal expressions influenced by African diasporic cultures, including Afro-American recordings recalling hip hop, richly inspired by African textures. These sounds were included not as contrast, but as connection, reflecting the interwoven cultural and sonic influences across Africa and how African sounds have shaped music worldwide. The piece brings together Central African hunter-gatherer voices, North African field recordings, and African diasporic vocal expressions into a single composition, exploring Africa as a continuum of creative and spiritual expression where ancestral and contemporary voices coexist.

The story behind the composition is one of listening, layering, and honouring sound as a living presence. The Bayaka voices, together with the additional recordings, create a dialogue between regions, times, and cultures. Forest and wire, field and studio, past and present coexist in the work. The aim was not to fix or reproduce history, but to allow the recordings to breathe anew, forming a composition that celebrates the mobility, vitality, and resonance of sound while connecting disparate African traditions in a shared sonic space.

Out in the forest with Bayaka hunters reimagined by Deep Dive Sound.

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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