INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Soundcities with embedded panoramas, and streetview.The soundmaps and the database can be listened to online or played on mobiles. The whole system can be used in live performances, as a concert. Festivals, schools and media organisations can organise workshops. You can contribute to the project by submitting your own sounds; see the help guide or just submit. A new digital art installation is also available for exhibitions that uses up to 300 speakers in a spatialised audio system of global sounds. Get in touch.

Sound of cities, city sounds. Souncities by stanza Sensor cloud across London for collecting data byStanza. stanza soundmaps Sensors all over London. Datacities.

ABOUT SOUNDCITIES

Soundcities is an online database of the thousands of sounds from around the world and you can visit the various cities and create soundmaps.

Soundcities was the first online open source database of global city sounds and soundmaps, using found sounds and field recording. There are now thousands of sounds from around the world on the website. This project allows the audience the possibility to remix the thousands of sampled recordings in an online database. The sounds can be listened to, used in performances, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. The soundcities database is also open so anyone can upload sounds they collect from world cities, thereby making a valuable and collaborative contribution to the project and helping to make this online sound archive.

The sounds of cities give clues to the emotional and responsive way we interact with our cities. Cities all have specific identities, and found sound create understanding about 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, loss, love and hope.

The soundcities project is growing labyrinth, a community of evolving aural cityscapes. The city is its own music, constantly evolving, a beautiful composition of squeaks, clanks, and pulses. 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 involve making 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 our interactions of the city space.

Stanza has spent the last 24 years traveling to over 70 worldwide cities. During this time he has collected and recorded the sounds from these cities to start this project off. The result is this Soundcities sound wesbite that is now an open platform; the worlds first online database of city sounds and soundmaps. The archive is a resource to make spatialisation and sonifications of the environment based on the analogue recorded sounds. The concept started in 1995 and in 1996 Stanza devised the term soundmaps and initiated the various sound and artworks that developed into soundcities.com. Stanza's interactive soundmaps have been online since 1997 and the Soundcities database since 2004.

BOOKING AND EXHIBITIONS

The project is available for exhibition, workshops and live performance. It is suitable for live concerts and media festivals and art galleries.

  • If you want to book a performance, the installation or a workshop get in touch.
  • If you would like to release the music cd or have ideas to develop and work with us get in touch.
  • If you want to use the database in a performance on your own or for an exhibition you must get permission first.

JOBS

Regional sound recordists wanted to get your city fully on the map, to act as city manager.

Copyright (c) Stanza All rights reserved. Soundcities is a project by the Britsh artist Stanza www.stanza.co.uk

Contact: EMAIL