Silent Sounds

In 2019, while walking on the beach of a small paradise-like island near Fukuoka in Japan, I instinctively took out my phone and started recording the sounds around me: the slow waves crashing onto the sand, birds chirping in nearby trees (and as I later noticed, loud gushes of wind). This was my first “Silent Sounds” recordings.

Sound has always played a vital role in my life, whether in the form of music or mindful moments when all you need is a deep breath and the sounds around you. It is also something often overlooked in the process of remembering one’s life, which we usually do in images. Memory is perhaps the overarching theme of my work, as I have often had lapses in autobiographical memory. This is the very thing that first pushed me towards photography, and the art of capturing moments altogether. As I soon realized with my first smartphone and their ever-improving video quality, the act of remembering is marginally improved when more senses are triggered — but of course various senses recall memories in different ways. Scent, known as the strongest sense, usually reminds us in the span of a few seconds a city, or a person. Images, whether still or moving, are of course tied to specific places and memories, while songs are often associated with emotions and broader time periods in one’s life. But what makes videos the closest thing to an actual memory — besides a moving image in first-person perspective — is sound. This made me wonder: what if we isolated sound in an effort to capture moments which we could recall later in life, and see what comes up? Can we really tell a particular place apart from another through sound? How strong would that association be?

Though this started as a purely personal endeavor, my intention is to turn it into a global collaborative project, collecting and sharing Silent Sounds from all of you, and the sounds of places near and dear to your hearts. My recordings have so far been of rather poor quality, as I am only using an iPhone mic, so please don’t worry if your quality isn’t the best. If you do have a mic, feel free to use it — the point is that these recordings should be markers in time to help you remember moments of your life. Ideally, these recordings should be at least thirty seconds long, so that listeners have a bit of time to immerse themselves in the soundscape and picture a place. A few of mine are a bit shorter than that, but feel free to play them back! The most important thing of course, is that we can clearly hear some of the sounds around you — and that there is no (or limited) direct talking into the mic. In order for us to connect sound and place, please also send a pinned map location of your recording alone with your submission, and feel free to go on Street View mode on my maps to explore the places that belong with these sounds.

I look forward to your submissions, and please enjoy my silent sounds!