Culture
DIY Your Own City Symphony With This Database of Urban Noise
The London artist Stanza has been crowdsourcing sounds from various cities since the ‘90s and wants people to use them for personal projects.
In Miami and Philadelphia, an MIT professor is leading citywide efforts to turn urban noise into a masterful symphony. But for enthusiasts elsewhere, who may not have the means to mobilize an entire community to gather soundbites, there are other ways to make a city sing.
Since the late 1990s, the London artist Stanza has been mapping sounds from cities across the globe—from New York to Berlin to Tokyo—and asking the public to contribute. “I realized that the whole value of putting it online is sharing it with everybody, so I made the database open sourced,” he says.