We tend to believe we know a place by looking at it. Stuart Fowkes is interested in what images miss. For the past 12 years, Fowkes has worked as a field recordist and sound artist, although his interest in recorded sound began earlier, through sampling, musical composition and live performance. In 2015, he founded Cities and Memory, a global collaborative sound map that invites people to record the world.
While the platform now contains around 8,000 sounds, the first upload was ‘a humble one-minute snippet’ recorded under a bridge near Fowkes’ house in Oxford: pigeons, joggers, gentle river sounds. ‘I regard the rest of the entire project as in effect an expanded reflection on and memory of that recording,’ he says. ‘It sounds like potential, and like a beginning.’
Over time, the platform began inviting artists to reimagine recordings as new compositions. More than 2,500 artists from around the world have now taken part. ‘This community can connect a recordist in Tokyo with a musician in Vancouver, over a field recording from Rome. And there’s something quite magical about that,’ Fowkes adds.
For Fowkes, sound is ‘a first-hand, living encounter with memory and emotion’. Images may tell us what a place looks like; sound gets under the skin. ‘A sound can drop you into a time and a place like nothing else,’ he says. You may know Venice through photographs, but until you hear the boat traffic, the footsteps over bridges, the city arriving through your ears, something essential remains out of reach.
In the last 20 years, our culture has become almost totally visually dominated, yet sound remains the most transportative and immersive sense. In the conversation that follows, Fowkes discusses listening as an active act, sound as a route into memory, and how a one-person project became a sonic portrait of the world.
A world mapped by sound
Wallpaper*: Before Cities and Memory started, were you already listening to the world differently?
Stuart Fowkes: I’ve always had an unusual sensitivity towards sound, and a preference for the sonic over the visual, which led me to the project in the first place. But over the last decade, Cities and Memory has taught me how to listen differently to the world, and how to listen better. Above all, it acts as a daily reminder that sound is active, whereas hearing is passive. Listening is something we do, and we all do it in our own individual way.
W*: Do you think Cities and Memory is ultimately a project about sound, or a project about people?
SF: It’s about both sound and people, and the intersection between them. It’s about how sound can help us connect, relate to one another, and explore some of the issues and mysteries that surround us. You can’t remove the people or the sound from Cities and Memory – they’re both fundamental. I think the fact that it’s built around emotion, memory, openness and connection is what separates it from most other sound or art projects.
Cities and Memory live in Oslo
W*: Why did you decide that every recording should have a reinterpretation, rather than simply building an archive of sounds?
SF: By bringing together sound recording and composition so directly, we’re acknowledging the great tradition of ‘all sound is music’ in the lineage of John Cage – and the way it can bring the world to life in all kinds of different ways. When an artist chooses a recording to work with, they apply their own lives, emotions and memories to it, creating a new way of listening to the world. You can navigate the sounds of the world as they are, explore an imagined sound world created by the collective imagination of thousands of artists, or move freely between the two.
W*: If you had to identify three moments that transformed Cities and Memory, what would they be?
SF: The first was receiving a recording and composition from someone outside the UK – a recording from Sofienbergparken in Oslo. It was the first time I felt the project had reached beyond itself, and perhaps the first time I believed there might really be something in it. Last year, I performed live in Oslo and returned to the same park to make my own recording from that spot, which felt emotionally important. The second was the launch of ‘Century of Sounds’ at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where we took over the museum for a night of live performances and panel discussions. Artists came from the UK, Italy, Spain, Japan and the USA; seeing around 40 contributors in person, many of whom I had only known as email addresses, was overwhelming and beautiful. Lastly, winning the Grand Prix at the Charles Cros Awards in Paris was special: to go from one sound recorded under a bridge near my house to an award-winning project spanning 140 countries, with lasting friendships and creative connections around the world.
Stuart Fowkes sampling a waterfall sound in the Azores
W*: Can a city have a sonic identity in the same way it has an architectural identity?
SF: You only have to listen to the hissing of steam pipes on the streets of Manhattan, the ‘mind the gap’ announcements on the London Underground, or the chopping splashes of moored gondolas in Venice to understand that cities are as alive and distinctive sonically as they are architecturally and visually. There is no ‘blue plaque’ scheme for recognising and protecting culturally significant sounds, and those sounds risk disappearing without anyone noticing until it is too late. Part of what I’m trying to do is encourage people first to listen to the world around them, and then to listen differently, with a deeper kind of appreciation.
W*: Do you think sound is a more honest record of a place than photography?
SF: Recording sound presents many of the same philosophical challenges as taking a photograph. Just as a photographer chooses what to frame and what to leave out, a recordist chooses which moment to capture, where to record, and how to stand or move during the recording. The intentionality and authorship are similar, which means every recording carries some element of the recordist’s perspective, whether we want it to or not. We are selecting moments in time, rather than arrangements of light. A recording of the same spot at different times of day can be as different as a photograph of the same place at midday and midnight. Can a recording tell us truths and stories about a place that photography, or even video, cannot? Absolutely. But is it more honest? I wouldn’t say so.
Stuart Fowkes recording Komsomolskaya station, Moscow
W*: Are you building a portrait of the world as it is, or a portrait of the world as it disappears?
SF: With the field recording and composition sides of Cities and Memory, we’re presenting a portrait of the world as it is, and also as it could be, filtered through the collective imagination of thousands of people. It’s the evolution of the world measured through sound, but mediated through emotion, memory and individual stories, which I think is a beautiful thing.