Sounding Underground is an online environment that invites you to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process.

 

These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro, as well as some shared sonic spaces. Sounding Underground also invites you to write memories, produced by listening. These memories are published randomly on the "Listening and Remembering" page. 

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This work brings to the surface the unique sonic features of the soundscapes from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as well as the common ones, as they were listened to and selected by commuters from recordings of their routine journeys.

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Funding and Collaborators

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This work was funded by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship 2007 -2009, as a research project called "Linking urban soundscapes via commuters' memories"

and supported by the Institute of Creative Technologies IOCT at De Montfort University. It had the support of institutions such as Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras - CMMAS, and Centro Multimedia, in the Centro Nacional de las Artes (CENART),  La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme - Paris Nord, and Plate-forme Technologique Arts Sciences. This work has been acknowledged by the metro companies: Sistema de Transporte Colectivo (STC) - Metro México, and RATP Paris Metro.