Fowkes is the founder of a new project called Protest and Politics—a sound map that documents the sounds of protest, as they grow louder in cities around the world. Indeed, from Brexit to Trump’s election, the past year has known more protests than many before it. [...]
The majority of the sounds that comprise Protest and Politics are from the last decade, but some date back to as early as the first Gulf War, in 1991. Many come from the protests following Trump’s election in the US and Brexit in the U.K., but they also run as far afield as women’s rights protests in Istanbul, and support for Narendra Modi in New Delhi. [...]
The project is part of a larger program Fowkes founded called Cities and Memory—a world map that uses sound to document the lived experience of any given destination. Fowkes, who is a digital consultant and hobby musician based in Oxford, curates each of his projects in his spare time. The majority of his field recordings are volunteer submissions, and the rest he records himself. Since its founding in 2014, hundreds of volunteer collaborators have collected all types of sounds (One project, “The Next Station,” documents the sounds of the London Underground, while another called “Sacred Spaces” collects sounds from churches and temples all over the world. One contributor even mapped the sound of the internet.). [...]
Sound maps have certain strengths that visual maps lack, especially when it comes to documenting cities. Daily life moves quickly—the experience of a place is easily affected by current events, or even just the time of day. Think of the Tokyo fish market, which is alive with splashing and yelling at dawn but settles to a hum by noon. With a sound map, you’re capturing more than the noise of a place—you’re also documenting the way it sounds at a particular point in time.
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