About the project
Sound Atlas
A temporal listening archive
Sound Atlas is an experiment in acoustic archaeology. It is a living map of the world's sounds, anchored in place and frozen in time.
Every recording in the archive is tied to an exact location and an exact moment. A train station in Tokyo at dawn. Rain on a tin roof in Bogotá. Market vendors in Marrakech on a Tuesday afternoon in March. The idea is simple: places have voices, and those voices change over the years.
The long-term vision is a time machine for the ears: a way to return to the same spot across decades and hear how the soundscape evolves. Cities grow louder, coastlines shift, stations are rebuilt, neighborhoods transform. Sound Atlas preserves these moments so future listeners can compare, remember, and discover.
How it works
Contributors record authentic ambient audio — 10 to 15 minutes of unedited sound from a specific place — and upload it with precise location and timestamp metadata. Every submission is reviewed before publication. Once approved, the recording appears on the public map for anyone to explore.
What belongs here
Ambient sounds of real places: city streets, parks, markets, stations, coastlines, neighborhoods, forests, public spaces. The archive values authenticity over production quality. Wind noise and passing footsteps are not flaws — they are the point.
What does not belong: music, staged performances, private conversations, copyrighted material, or content that violates privacy or local law.
Contributing
Sign in with Google and use the upload form to submit your recording. You'll need to confirm that you have the right to share the audio and that it was recorded lawfully. All submissions enter a moderation queue and are reviewed before publication.