Sounds recorded across 51 countries aim to reframe the conversation around migration in a unique partnership between the University of Oxford and Cities and Memory.
The first ever global collection of the sounds of human migration has been created as part of a year-long collaboration between Cities and Memory and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford.
Migration Sounds, which launches on Monday 16 September, features 120 sounds and stories of migration across 51 countries from Argentina to Australia, featuring personal stories from diaspora communities all over the world as well as migration camps and dramatic sea rescues.
The project is packed with remarkable sound recordings, and - crucially - each is accompanied by the story behind the sound and what it means to the person who recorded it. The collection includes:
- Dramatic sounds of the rescue of migrants in the Mediterranean
- Traditional ways of life, including nomadic Kazakh herdsmen in China, Bedouin tribes in Egypt or Inuit dog sleds in Greenland
- Migration-related protests - against police brutality in France, against anti-migration laws in Germany and the USA
- The sounds of diaspora communities including the Filipino community in Dubai, the Chinese community in New York, or Sikh, Polish, Jamaican and Bangladeshi communities in London
- The production of razor wire to create fortifications for Hungary’s border fences
- The aftermath of riots in a migration centre in Greece
- The sounds of people crossing borders and making the journeys of migration, both forced and unforced
- The essential role played by activities like traditional cookery and the playing of music for immigrants all over the world
- Dozens of moving stories of ordinary daily life as an immigrant in countries all over the world and how sound helps to tell those stories.
Migration Sounds was twelve months in the making, and will launch as an interactive online exhibition at citiesandmemory.com/migration.
From November 6th-8th 2024, the project will also be the subject of a pop-up exhibition at the University of Oxford’s world famous Pitt Rivers Museum.
Stuart Fowkes, founder of Cities and Memory, said:
“Migration is one of the most polarising topics in the world today, with many conversations retreading the same ground. Because sound transports us directly and vividly into the lived experiences of human migration, it allows us to reframe those conversations and throw a new light on its complex and multifaceted nature.
“Sound also grounds our experience and shows that migration is about the everyday, settled lives of countless millions of people - not just about arduous journeys across borders.
“The reimagined compositions add a whole new layer of emotion and complexity, revealing even greater depth to what is already an extraordinary collection of sounds telling so many rich human stories.”
Rob McNeil, a researcher into migration in the media at the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), said:
“Hearing a family being reunited after years apart, or ultrasound of baby’s heartbeat recorded in a country thousands of miles from the mother’s place of birth, tells a very different kind of story about migration - and engages people in a different way - than most news coverage.
“We’re trying to encourage people to understand migration in different ways, and to use different senses - in this case hearing - to form different types of knowledge about a complex issue.
“Listening to these sounds can give people a deeper and richer sense of what it means to migrate, what it means to lose loved-ones to another place, how it feels to escape or to feel “at home” - subtle things that define the experience of migration, but that a chart showing annual net migration or deportations will simply bulldoze.
“The remixed versions also provide a fascinating counterpoint to news about migration - a form of emotional reportage: reinterpreting and reimagining of the stories that is the polar opposite of a fact-driven article in a newspaper.”
Taking the sounds of migration to an entirely different place, each recording has also been reshaped and reimagined as a creative composition by more than 100 musicians and sound artists from all over the world.
Many of these artists are from migrant backgrounds themselves, and the compositions reflect new and highly personal perspectives on migration, settlement, home and exile, all conveyed through sound.
Artistic approaches used to reimagine the sounds of migration include the creation of entire lyric songs from the source material, electronica pieces, poetry, ambient music, sound art, neoclassical, spoken word and many more.
Notes to editors
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact: Stuart Fowkes, Cities and Memory stuart@citiesandmemory.com / +44 7974 736802
Rob McNeil, COMPAS robert.mcneil@compas.ox.ac.uk / +44 7500 970081
Embedded sound playlists, selections or mixes of migration sounds and their corresponding reimagined compositions from the project can be made available for radio or online use. We can also provide a full preview of the project on request.
About Cities and Memory
Cities and Memory is one of the world’s biggest sound projects, with features in The Guardian, New York Times, Sunday Times, BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 Late Junction and BBC World Service, The Atlantic, Wired, Vice and many more.
Migration Sounds is the latest project from Cities and Memory, one of the world’s biggest sound projects, which has more than 6,000 sounds covering more than 120 countries and territories, and more than 1,800 worldwide contributing artists, with the aim of remixing the world, one sound at a time.
Previous global Cities and Memory projects have included Polar Sounds, reimagining the sounds of the Arctic and Antarctic, #StayHomeSounds (a global mapping of the sounds of the Covid-19 lockdowns), Protest and Politics (the biggest ever collection of the sounds of protest) and Obsolete Sounds, the first global survey of disappearing, obsolete and endangered sounds. www.citiesandmemory.com
About COMPAS
The Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) is a research centre at the University of Oxford. Since 2003, COMPAS has established an international reputation for original research and policy relevance. It undertakes multi-disciplinary research, publication, teaching, and user engagement activities with a broad set of academic and non-academic users worldwide.
COMPAS has over 20 staff members from a range of backgrounds and is actively involved in many international networks and projects. COMPAS is based within the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and houses long-standing initiatives The Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, and The Migration Observatory. https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/
