This recording captures birdsong and locals passing through a quiet public garden in central Mantua. The recording was made on the 29th May 2012, about five minutes after a strong earthquake had struck the Emilia Romagna region, causing significant damage to the UNESCO World Heritage property of the Cathedral, Torre Civica and Piazza Grande.
Recorded by Cities and Memory.
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2:02
Emilia
"In May 2012, two major earthquakes struck Northern Italy, causing 27 deaths and widespread damage. The events are known in Italy as the 2012 Emilia earthquakes, because they mainly affected the Emilia region.
"The field recording captured birdsong and locals passing through a quiet public garden in central Mantua, five minutes after the Emilia earthquakes. I wanted to depict the contrast between the calmness of the Mantua gardens and the earthquakes that happened within close temporal and distance proximity of each other."
Gardens in Mantova reimagined by Ben Hoang.
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4:34
Henal mariacki
"The transitioning nature of the field recording made for some melodic transitioning in the background. The trumpet call ends abruptly but returns again and again."
Krakow trumpet call reimagined by Moray Newlands.
IMAGE: Oliszydlowski, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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4:21
Hejnal Mariacki
Probably Poland's most iconic sound, the hejnał mariacki (literally "Saint Mary's dawn") is a trumpet call that sounds every hour on the hour from the highest tower of St Mary's Church in Kraków's rynek glówny (main square).
The bugler plays the same call four times, once in each of the cardinal directions. This tradition dates back to medieval times, when the call was used to signal the opening and closing of the city gates at dawn and dusk. It was also played to alarm citizens of fires or enemy invasion.
The theme's abrupt end commemorates the Mongol-Tatar siege of 1241, when the trumpeter warning the city of the imminent threat was shot in the throat by an arrow mid-way through the call.
Or so the legend goes... I made this recording a couple of months after moving to Kraków as part of a project through which I attempted to reconnect with my Polish-Jewish heritage and, in a more general sense, to explore the experience of migration through sound.
Recorded by Alex Roth.
IMAGE: Oliszydlowski, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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3:59
In concrete corridors
In March 2025 we made a series of recordings in and around the Barbican Centre, with the idea of those sounds being folded back into the Observatory Station sound installation, so that the sounds of the Barbican itself become part of the stories being told by sound from around the world.
This recording is a walkthrough of some of the exterior concrete tunnels and walkways that make up this brutalist masterpiece - footsteps, various mysterious drones, and the sounds of assorted passers-by.
Recorded by Cities and Memory.
À propos de Cities and Memory - remixing the world
Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world.
The project presents an amazingly-diverse array of field recordings from all over the world, but also reimagined, recomposed versions of those recordings as we go on a mission to remix the world.
What you'll hear in the podcast are our latest sounds - either a field recording from somewhere in the world, or a remixed new composition based solely on those sounds. Each podcast description tells you more about what you're hearing, and where it came from.
There are more than 7,000 sounds featured on our sound map, spread over more than 130 countries and territories. The sounds cover parts of the world as diverse as the hubbub of San Francisco’s main station, traditional fishing women’s songs at Lake Turkana, the sound of computer data centres in Birmingham, spiritual temple chanting in New Taipei City or the hum of the vaporetto engines in Venice. You can explore the project in full at www.citiesandmemory.com
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