'Sonic Heritage' project lets people experience world's most iconic places through sound

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: If you think of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, you might conjure an image of Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, but what does that famous place or any place, for that matter, sound like?

Amna Nawaz: The new project timed to World Heritage Day asks us to experience the world in a different way, through its sounds.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: The call of ravens in the Tower of London, part of the legend of an historic place. He’s playing music at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. They are two among 7,000 recordings from 130 countries and territories around the world, now part of a sound map.

The project called Cities and Memory was created by sound artist Stuart Fowkes.

Stuart Fowkes, Creator, Cities and Memory: It’s about trying to create in some ways a new way of listening to the world, because I’m hoping that when people come to the sound map and listen to some of the sounds on Cities and Memory then maybe the next day when they’re heading off into the metro or for a walk in the woods, maybe they take their headphones off and they just listen to that world, the world around them a little bit more closely than they might have done the day before.

Jeffrey Brown: Fowkes based in Oxford, England, collects his own audio recordings in the field and solicits sounds recorded by people all over the world.

This is a part-time labor of love for him. His day job is head of communications with a human rights group.

When we listen to the world, as you’re trying to get us to do, in what way is that different from seeing the world?

Stuart Fowkes: I think the thing about sound is, it is enormously transformative. It places you into a moment and into an experience in a way that almost no other sense does. It places you into the experience of being in that place in a way that looking at a photograph or sometimes even looking at a video just won’t allow you to do. So sound is incredibly close to us as a sense.

We can all hear before we’re born. And sound is something that really sits very close to our everyday lives.

Jeffrey Brown: His latest project is titled Sonic Heritage, sounds collected from 270 UNESCO sites in 68 countries, as well as from cultural practices and natural wonders around the world, gray whales recorded off Mexico’s Pacific Coast whale sanctuary of El Vizcaino.

From Southern Spain the song, guitar and dance of flamenco. A reverberation of sound heard inside the Taj Mahal.

Stuart Fowkes: To me, World Heritage Sites have always been fascinating because we always conceive of them as visual postcards. If I talk to you about the Colosseum or about Machu Picchu, you can instantly conjure up an image of what that looks like in less than a second in your mind’s eye.

But if I ask you what that sounds like, that’s another question. Sound is such an immersive sense that you’re kind of missing out on half the picture by just regarding these sites as postcards. And you’re missing out on half the experience of being there. And I think that’s what sound brings to the picture.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also the impact of people, us, especially through the growing problem of overtourism.

At the Sistine Chapel in Rome, a murmur building to the clatter of hundreds of tourists, then the sharp pry of a guard.

Stuart Fowkes: There is a real surprise in how some of these sites actually sound. Some of that is related to the natural acoustics of the space and some of it is related to the sheer amount of people that are being crammed into that space.

And I think this project doesn’t just aim to highlight the beauty of some of these sounds, for example the natural soundscapes or the sounds of amazing bells or prayers. It also seeks to highlight some of the ways in which the presence of tourists affects those spaces through sound.

Jeffrey Brown: In every case, the field recordings are also given to artists and musicians around the world to remix or, in Fowkes’ word, reimagine something new, first the recording of craftspeople in Ghana weaving traditional kente cloth, next the reimagining of that same recording.

Stuart Fowkes: The composition which has been made by an artist called Formolo is all about the idea of time and the idea that this is a time-consuming, manual labor kind of practice. So he’s taken elements of the original field recording. He’s stretched different parts out of different kind of time spans and used different lengths of time within the composition to really speak to this idea that this is a time-consuming process.

Jeffrey Brown: Is there an advocacy element to this work to wake us up in some way?

Stuart Fowkes: Yes, absolutely. With Cities and Memory, a lot of the projects that we run are looking at a particular subject using sound as the lens to do that.

So, for example, we overrun projects on the sound of protest and social activism. There have been — last year, we ran a project called Migration Sounds, which is on the sound of human migration, so reframing the idea of migration through sound. We’re also trying to raise kind of awareness that we need to listen.

Jeffrey Brown: You can listen to more of the sounds from World Heritage Sites, including this of a chorus of birds at dusk in Mount Kenya National Park, by visiting citiesandmemory.com/heritage.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.