Open call - join the 2026 Spring Project! 🍃

More than 200 sounds now available for artist to reimagine and recompose 🎧

Hi everyone

It’s that time of year again - we’re excited to launch the 2026 Spring Project, an open call for artists all over the world!

If you’ve not taken part before, twice every year we open the Cities and Memory sound database to everyone, sharing the latest recordings submitted to the project for you to reimagine and recompose.

It’s a chance to be part of our mission to remix the world, one sound at a time - and a great creative challenge to work with sound in a new, open and interesting way.

This spring, there are more than 200 recordings to choose from, covering 38 countries - and including:

• Remarkable wildlife recordings from Tanzania 🇹🇿, with lion prides, hyenas, zebras and hippos 🦁

• Sounds from our recent recording trip to Marrakech 🇲🇦, including musicians and snake charmers in the iconic Jemaa el-Fnaa square, life in the busy medina markets, the Jardin Majorelle and waterfalls in the Atlas Mountains

• Recordings made by Cities and Memory in Paris 🇫🇷 including late-night jazz clubs, art installations, cathedral bells, stations and metro rides

• Natural soundscapes of howling coyotes, humpback whale song, amphibians choruses and the clacking of nesting storks

• Street and market recordings from cities, towns and villages across China 🇨🇳 by roving recordist Digimonk

• Sounds from “potent places” from Anders Vinjar’s HEYR collection, including Auschwitz, Ground Zero, Afghanistan, George Floyd Square and Utoya ⚠️

• Sacred spaces from chiming cathedral bells, Muslim calls to prayer and Buddhist temples 🕍

• Sports sounds, street soundscapes, shops and markets, protest marches, industry, machinery, transportation and much more! 🎧

The project is open to musicians, composers and sound artist anywhere in the world, and you have until Friday 5 June to create your piece.

You simply pick a recording that speaks to you, and reimagine that sound. Alternatively, we can assign a recording to you at random if you prefer the element of chance!

All you need to do is hit this button or send us an email to let us know you’re interested, and we’ll send back all the details and a link to our sound database.

Your piece must contain the original recording, or some element of it (whether “natural” or processed/effected), but other than that the creative brief is open to your response to the sound. Here are the compositions submitted for the Spring Project in 2025.

Pieces must be less than 20 minutes long, submitted as WAV files - we don’t conduct any levelling or mastering at our end, so your piece should be supplied ready to be shared with the world.

Every composition submitted is added to Cities and Memory and to our global sound map, and released as a podcast episode on Spotify, Apple Music and everywhere else. Sounds from the spring collection will also be selected for our annual Sounds of the Year album at the end of 2026.

Hope to see you on the project, whether you’ve been contributing to Cities and Memory for years or this is your first time remixing the world!

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Three months left to take part in Ways of Listening

Don’t forget that Ways of Listening with Dame Evelyn Glennie is open until 19 June, so there are three months left to work on your contribution to this groundbreaking project.

As a reminder, Ways of Listening is a unique global project asking you to share your answer to one simple question – “What does listening mean to you?”

The project is a partnership between Cities and Memory and The Evelyn Glennie Foundation to raise awareness of the critical importance of listening in all its forms, and the benefits that better listening can bring to us all.

What I’m most excited about is that this is our first multidisciplinary project - so if you also work in visual arts, video, photography, poetry or the written word, this is your time!

The call is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, to respond through whichever creative medium you feel best allows you to express what listening means to you.

If you know anyone working in these fields, we’d hugely appreciate it if you could spread the word about this project too - we think it has the potential to be something really special.

As always, thank you for listening!

Stuart.