Last month I contributed to a project by a visual artist working in Zurich called Veronika Spierenburg. Spierenburg engaged sound recordists to undertake field recording in cities that were currently under various stages of “lockdown” due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
From Veronika’s briefing:
Click here to visit the project websiteNow, cities breathe for themselves. City pitches are reset; an extraordinary crisis that produces its own specific sound. Invisibility has found its form, and empowered us. Can we stop? Can we just listen to the sound?
Can this crisis bring us to a new future? Will the city’s noise be different after the crisis? In the future, will human voices finally come back to the streets and will traffic jams become a thing of the past? Metaphorically, this work is dedicated to voices we could not hear. The voices that were and still are drowned out by the loudest voices (a reference to politics and art). Those quiet voices will finally be raised.