Birds Chirping and People Cheering: Listen to Life Under Lockdown on New Sound Map

A sound mapping project is collecting sounds from all over the world to show how the coronavirus situation is transforming cities and spaces while helping people feel “a little bit more connected”.

“The way the world sounds has changed really dramatically in just a few weeks,” says Stuart Fowkes, founder of the #StayHomeSounds project shared on the Cities and Memory website, to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It’s really important that we recognise that and record it for posterity, but that we also get the stories as well – what people are thinking and feeling at the same time.”

Within a week of the project’s launch, dozens of people from over 25 countries shared recordings from their daily lives, highlighting the change in sounds caused by the pandemic, ranging from calm nature sounds replacing traffic noise to recordings of people cheering for healthcare workers across the globe.

“While you are on lockdown, you can at least do a bit of sonic tourism,” adds Fowkes. “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly … hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.”