Open call - join our latest project Music for Sleep
Field recordings wanted for a global project exploring how sound and sleep work together
Hi everyone
Today we’re excited to launch the first stage of our new global project, Music for Sleep - and we’d love you to be a part of it!
Music for Sleep is a collaboration between artists and field recordists to create a worldwide, wide-ranging collection of precious compositions specifically designed to induce, aid and boost sleep.
We’re looking for field recordings around the themes of tranquillity, restfulness and sleep, and artists who would like to approach the challenge of developing a composition designed to aid sleep.
Join the project
Submit your recordings
We are currently seeking field recordings from all over the world that reflect your interpretation of sleep, rest and tranquillity – these restful soundscapes could be drawn from the natural world or man-made sounds, rural or urban.
Whether it’s birdsong, crashing waves, chiming bells, jungles and forests teeming with life, a city sleeping at night, the recordings simply need to represent your own interpretation of relaxation, peacefulness or sleep, and can be from anywhere in the world.
Submit your recordings at this link by Friday 30 June: https://bit.ly/sleeprecordings
Join as an artist
If you’re an artist who’d like to join the waitlist for creating a sleep-themed composition, just add your name here and we will contact you when the recordings are available in a few weeks: https://bit.ly/sleepwait
Why Music for Sleep?
Our world is edging towards a sleep crisis, with everything from the cost of living and digital connection to climate change causing more and more of us to lose sleep – with potentially devastating consequences.
While noise can be a major issue in preventing a good night’s sleep, sound can play a vital role in helping to restore our sleep balance, and can even help us to forget traumatic memories. Whether it’s using noise of various colours from white to blue, movements like slow radio, music that aids relaxation or the sounds of nature, sound could be crucial to tackling the global sleep deficit.
How will the project work?
Artists will reimagine recordings from a treasure trove of birdsong, wave sounds, nature, song, bell chimes and other calming sound sources to develop a suite of brand new pieces that will help listeners all over the world to find sleep.
Contributing artists will be free to develop compositions that reflect their own interpretation, thoughts and memories around what sleep, rest and tranquillity mean to them, whether that’s ambient music, piano, strings or guitar, spoken word, sound art or another sonic approach.
The resulting pieces will be presented individually, and highlights from the project will also be woven together by Cities and Memory into an hour-long, sleep-focused composition that sits at the centre of the Music for Sleep project.
The project will run in two phases:
1. An open call for field recordings from around the world that speak to the themes of sleep, rest and relaxation
2. An open call for artists to develop compositions built from those recordings, designed to help listeners find tranquillity, relax and sleep
The project will launch on Cities and Memory and across our podcast during late summer 2023 – and compositions and recordings selected for the project will be archived by the British Library’s digital archive and preserved for the future.
Take the Cities and Memory survey
Do you have five minutes to spare to help us make Cities and Memory even better? Take our quick survey and let us know what’s working for you and how we could improve the project - we’ll be listening closely and taking action on as much of the feedback as possible. Thank you!
Listen to Sounds from Egypt
As part of our recent Spring Project, we received an incredible collection of recordings from Rafael Diogo made across Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo and Luxor. Our community of artists responded with some beautiful compositions that really captured some of the spirit of the country. You can find these on our new album release, Sounds from Egypt, which is free to download as ever. Tune in here for a sonic tour across Egypt:
That’s all from us for now - we hope to see you on the next project, and look forward to listening to your sleep-themed recordings!
All the best from Oxford,
Stuart.