Cities and Memory - remixing the world

I wondered if I could combine something foreign with the fully formed musical space of African polyrhythms, so I tried creating parallel sounds using a Chinese qin, a Western double bass, and a violin. When I combined the rough sounds from field recordings with the sounds created in the studio, it worked surprisingly well. 

Listening closely, I also noticed that the rhythms of African drums resemble those of the taiko drums played at Japanese village festivals.

Festival at Rich reimagined by Keisuke Oki.

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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 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 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

Rock gong music from Nigeria, some rhythms accompanied by singing, with spoken introduction.

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 Bernard Evelyn Buller Fagg.

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

Zande "witch doctor" song performed by Badobo.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Zande songs, dances and spoken language made by social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930.

Recorded by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard.

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

Instruments in the forest at dawn (flute and harp).

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

"Then we heard the grass blades bending under the laziest hooves
but they know how slow they should be grazing at noon 

Then we heard the pine twigs snapping under bare feet and fresh blisters forming from the here and now because they know how fast good pain turns to fluid

Then I heard the tallest reeds breaking under boots of rubber and I couldn’t help but think of the 87 months it took those barks to become adult because they know when they’re ready to bleed

It’s when the man’s hands form the cup for the milk to rest and sit and wait and stop moving because they both know how long fluid turns solid so it can stretch and bend and stretch and bend again between hardened hands of fewer grooves than blisters

But the blisters didn’t know when that large cylinder would come to move things along and the man became two and they learnt each others’ names as they rolled and compressed and rolled and compressed again until the rubber was already rubber and the blisters were gone because the hands became idle while the cylinder kept turning for god knows how long 

So the men unlearnt how to tell time and the two men became one again and he no longer knew his name so was now just “the man” from somewhere he can’t remember and how did we get here?

First we heard the tallest reeds whistling"
Text by Yorgos O’Neill-Zafeiropoulos 

In this soundscape, I have worked solely with the original sound clip "Instruments in the forest at dawn (flute and harp)". This 1993 recording was made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno in the Central African Republic and features the Bayaka musicians Momboli on flute and Boyobi on the geedal (bow harp).

You will hear this clip around 34 times but at different speeds, making "time" — and therefore pitch — the main variable altered to produce the soundscape. No recordings or sounds of my own were added. At the end of the piece, you can hear the original, unedited full clip re-emerging from the warped soundscape.

Artist: Christina-Shelagh Mongelli; mixing/mastering: Matt Chapman; creative text: Yorgos O'Neill-Zafeiropoulos

Instruments in the forest at dawn reimagined by Christina-Shelagh Mongelli.

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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

Phonophany, or the All-Revealing Medium dramatises the manifestation of occult and hidden mediation processes present in both audio technologies and Zande magic practices. As a composition, it works from a field recording of a Zande revelation song used to detect witches, employing audio mediation to allow the listener to experience a progressive unfolding of the recorded voice from initially unintelligible, noisy signals. In doing so, the work reflects on how to move beyond preconceptions of audio as a purely documentarian medium that simply “captures” reality. Rather than treating sound recording as transparent representation, the composition foregrounds mediation itself — specifically in the form of electromagnetic noise — as a way of listening oriented toward gradual aural revelation. This approach seeks to expand the capacity of audio media and recording technologies to articulate concepts and probe the audio field, thereby reframing our perception of media and their sensory environments.

Phonophany, a term of my own coinage emerging from this work, designates a process of approaching sound in ways that render the otherwise unhearable manifest, including the revelation of occult and hidden mediation processes. The term does not refer exclusively to microphonic technologies, but also to modes of attention that privilege the emergence of new physical or immaterial dimensions of sound. In this sense, phonophany proposes a shift away from audio naturalism toward an understanding of sound as something that becomes meaningful through layers of mediation, interference, and transformation.

To dramatise the historical and ideological entanglement between hidden processes in audio technology and Zande witchcraft — while also responding to Evans-Pritchard’s invitation to attend to relationships between actors and mediators — the composition treats the medium as an authority, a technology, and a protocol through which things emerge, become transparent, and acquire clarity. In practice, the work employs the field recording alongside two telephone coil microphones, used mutually as carriers through vocoders. A vocoder operates by analysing the spectral and amplitude characteristics of an input sound, often speech, and imposing those characteristics onto another sound, typically a sustained tone or noise. It does so by splitting both signals into frequency bands, extracting the modulator’s envelope in each band, and using those envelopes to shape the carrier, producing the distinctive fused effect often described as speech passing through a synthesiser.

Within this setup, the telephone coil is significant not only for its association with overhearing, surveillance, and technological transparency, but also for its ability to capture normally unhearable electromagnetic impulses and convert them into audible signals. Applying a vocoder to each track allows the channels to speak into one another: when the microphone picks up electromagnetic noise, the revelation song becomes hearable; when the song is sung, electromagnetic noise is unleashed. Through this reciprocal process, the revelatory power of microphonic devices and witch doctors’ songs becomes aesthetically entangled as a shared act of unveiling mediation through the senses.

Ultimately, Phonophany, or the All-Revealing Medium proposes audio artefacts as sites of both transparency and opacity: outcomes of social processes, entanglements, and mediations that reveal with one hand while concealing with the other.

Zande witch doctor song reimagined by Luigi Monteanni.

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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

Ceremonial (wedding) music from the Eastern Himalayas in Nepal.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of music and spoken language (principally Thulung Rai) made by anthropologist Nicholas Allen in Nepal and India between 1970 and 1981.

Recorded by Nicholas Justin Allen. 

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

This project was a bit of a step out of my comfort zone, since, not having any cultural connection to or knowing anything much about Bulgarian traditional music, I felt extremely out of place working on this project. As someone who works with ethnomusic on a regular basis, the questions of cultural appropration and sensitivity to such things all too often come up. But, it is a tradition that inspires me and that I would like to learn more about, so I wanted to approach this with as much care and knowledge as I could, and hopefully learn something in the process. 

My first step was to research the songs sung in the long recording, and hopefully find more about their traditional contexts, i.e. what they mean, what seasons and context they were sung in, etc. since from my own knowledge traditional music often has a certain (often seasonal) context it is sung in. And not knowing the language made it more difficult, especially when one is dealing with archive recordings, which are often extremely unclear. 

However, the first song in the 45-minute recording had a refrain I was able to pick up, and through that I was able to find a different version of the song in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies archive - the link can be found here, https://archive.artstudies.bg/FolklorMusicArchive/View/14 - and I was able to figure out that this song is a harvest song - Вечер малка моме - inviting a girl to come and eat and drink (presumably at a feast). I have seen so many traditional songs from different cultures that basically mean ”come party”, so I felt that this would be a common theme that resonates with international audiences. 

With the subject matter of the song itself known I had to then figure out what context my own piece would be in. I decided that I would put this in the context of modern life - that often modern society asks us to be staring at our screens working in sterile spaces, far from nature, singing together, and those sort of parties can often be far from our modern existence. 

In the context of the recording we open in a space of hectic movement and clacking computer keyboards (and the oddity of it all is that I created this staring at a screen…). Somewhere in between the sound of an old woman comes in, imitating birds (this is another ethnographic recording, this time from the Estonian Folklore Archives - where I currently live and study traditional music). Then the song that started this whole project comes in, several times. At certain points other sounds come in, but every time the songs come in the clacking and modern life sounds - the movement inside public transport, the slamming of doors - disappears and nature takes over. Each time the song comes back, there are more and more nature sounds, as if drawing us to a more peaceful place to be together, sing together, and have fun together. At the end we are only surrounded by nature, with only a violin tune played by fiddlers Mihkel Toom and Mart Männimets in the background (also from the Estonian Folklore Archives), bringing us to the celebrations. 

I hope that this piece can remind the listener of the importance of being in nature and being together. I also hope that, if it is not already, the archive recording that this piece was based on will be made available/known to all who study, perform, or are interested in Bulgarian traditional music, I think it would be of huge interest and help to that community. 

Bulgarian village conversations and women singing reimagined by Katja Rumin.

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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 original sound source for this composition is a selection of Nuristani songs. The voice is accompanied by a plucked and bowed string instrument as a type of rhythmic drone. This recording is a recently rediscovered item in the Pitt Rivers sound museum and I was drawn to it based on its historical and tonal ambiguity. I find it interesting that the library information is not able to give an exact date for the recording, and it could have been recorded in either 1954, 1964, or 1970. There seems to be many conflicting theories about the "origins" of the people residing in the Nuristani area, however due to the more recent introduction of Islam, their pre-Islamic rites, religion and rituals are still strong. 

The language that the songs are recited in attracted me as it did not sound like the main current language used in that region. As a young child I lived in the north west of Iran which is not far from Afghanistan and remember those years as a profoundly simple, dream-like and creatively rich source of my silent inner memory palace. There are infinite sound worlds resting in that deep inner silence and this composition juxtaposes through the use of sound the innocence of this seemingly ritualistic music with the intensity of the more recent history of the region.

Traditional Nuristani songs reimagined by Mastaneh Nazarian.

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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