Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • 2607: The Sirens of Gotham
    The wail of sirens is a familiar element in the New York City soundscape. No new sounds have been added to Stuart Fowkes’ field recording of police sirens at Elizabeth and Grand Streets on the Lower East Side. The original recording is reverse-printed onto itself so that when rising and falling tones cross, the observer perceives both ends of the Doppler shift simultaneously—as if the sound is approaching and receding at the same time. This backwards-forwards combined track is repeated and run through multiple layers of resonance filtering and stereo field motion. The sounding clarions, vanguard of the armies of the urban night, move and merge to become an elegiac dirge.
    Reimagined by Tom Miller.
    4 min
  • 2601: A big dream in New York City
    Sidewalks in Manhattan reimagined by John Tenney. 
    "“Life in NYC is so dense, so intense, that it’s easy to slip into a dream… Or maybe it’s a dream wrapped up inside a bigger dream…” Another description: "A walker is strolling around New York, past hawkers and musicians and markets and other stuff, and eventually goes into a dream, descending a staircase into 'the underworld' from which he is rudely snapped awake." The original sound has that fierce "underground" sound, which also meshes nicely with the overall background sound on the streets of much of the city. I have spent quite a lot of time there, so I think I know..."
    5 min
  • 2600: A certain emptiness
    Chinatown train recording reimagined by Martin Juenke. 
    "The original recording contains rhythmic elements, arbitrary sound events and overall a sense of coming and going. All these elements led to the structure of this track: an underlying rhythm, atmospheric events from the original recording spread all over and from time to time an increasing tension through building up sounds, followed by a certain emptiness."
    4 min
  • 2598: The sidewalks are alive!
    What's that sound coming from beneath the streets? Across Manhattan, the sidewalks often sound as if they are alive, characters in the everyday movie about New York City, as rumbling subway trains and hissing vents mean that in this noisiest of cities, even the pavement you walk on has something to say. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    4 min
  • 2595: Grand Central Terminal at midday
    Grand Central Terminal is an incredible space - visually and in terms of space. Its huge ceilings and marbled hard surfaces lend it an amazing reverb, and as an extremely busy rail terminal, it's almost always full of people rushing to their next destination, so there's a constant reverb-drenched hum in the space at all times, interspersed with sharp interjections from the PA announcements, which cut through the hubbub. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    4 min
  • 2597: Subway's Atavism
    New York metro from Roosevelt Island reimagined by Vlad Suppish.
    "When I was listening to the whole recording, I've particularly liked that signal sound (when train is due to set off). Resembles of a cuckoo bird to me. That was an initial trigger from which I've developed an idea of merging technology and nature, modern urban life and ancestral tribal memories."
    8 min

About Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world.