Migration Sounds video transcript

Stuart Fowkes - Founder, Cities and Memory:
Cities and Memory is one of the world's largest sound projects. I think it's probably best defined - we've got this phrase, 'Remixing the World, One Sound at a Time' - so what we do is, we take real-world recordings, so field recordings - whether that's the sound of a church bell or a train station or something like that - and we offer that out to artists around the world, and artists create new compositions, musical compositions, sound-art compositions, whatever they want from those original field recordings in order to create this kind of alternative imagined sound world out of the real sounds of the world.

Delphine Boagey - Communications Officer, Centre on Migration Policy and Society:
It was really interesting to see what sort of sounds people brought forward and how then the sound artists reimagined those sounds. They were so wide and broad in terms of what sound meant to them, what music meant to them, and what migration meant to them.

We actually managed to bring the exhibit into the Pitt Rivers Museum for three days, open to the public and free to everybody.

Rafael Diogo - Artist:
It's the connection you have as a field recordist with a subject that you want to record. And, most of the time, it's about distance. It has to be a unique sound and something that has a concept, something that you can bring to a person and is going to create some emotions in them.

Stuart:
The field recordings on Cities and Memory, we've got about 6,000 sounds on this central sound map and it covers pretty much any type of sound you can imagine - so there's a whole range of stuff on there.

Marc van de Griendt - Artist:
I am one of the musicians - for want of a better word - who makes compositions based on those field recordings. There's always a bank to choose from, so you listen around for things that sonically grab you. It's always interesting to try and listen out for the story that's in there and how you can engage with that story.

Stuart:
We had a conversation with COMPAS, which is obviously the Centre of Policy, Migration and Society at Oxford about the idea of doing this around migration. We wanted to explore the idea of using sound as a way of finding a new angle on migration. There was very natural ground to put together a project that could use sounds to offer like a new look at migration.

Delphine:
Migration is something that is fundamental to all of us. We all have experiences of migration, maybe personally or within our families or our friends.

Rafael:
When I travel, I tend to go to remote places, off-track places away from tourist places. This is the core of migrants, that's where they are.

Marc:
When we were talking about migration as the context for this recording project, I thought actually what I want to do is I want to be able to imagine the musical dance
that I make around this melody. It comes from a different culture to the one that I would normally work with, and I could see how the kind of thing that I would make would work around it.

Stuart:
There's so many artistic approaches. There's people that have written entire songs with lyrics and sung vocals just built around one field recording; there's people that have done dense slabs of ambient drone work; there's spoken word in there. But then some of the ones that impressed me the most are where the artist has actually got in touch with the person that made the original field recording and actually worked on a remote collaboration with them, so it really became a proper collaboration between the recording artist and the composer.

Marc:
I enjoyed the process of making that music. I can only hope that the people who were in that field recording would enjoy the project likewise.

Delphine:
I think with this project, hopefully it's allowed us to challenge some of those stereotypes that surround migration and perhaps offer the public a space to reconsider and
re-evaluate who we're talking about when we talk about migration. And the answer of course is everyone, because it's such a fundamental part of what it is to be human.