A soundmap of the world in lockdown

Last March, British composer Pete Stollery had a sound idea. The professor of electroacoustic music and composition at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, reached out via social media and asked people to send in recordings of ways in which their everyday soundscapes had changed amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Stollery has received 241 recordings from 24 countries so far — the bulk of these from the UK and mainland Europe, the rest from around the world, including the US, Canada, Japan, India and Australia. Submissions are still rolling in and Stollery is logging them one by one. Many are now audible on his Google Earth sound map, a sonic memory of a unique time, preserved for posterity.