Plan a Sonic Journey + Share Sounds

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. On this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world, or you can search the database for specific sounds by different artists from certain places. If you are a phonographer, you can also contribute your recordings for others to enjoy. The Creative Commons Attribution license encourages the sharing and reuse of all sounds on this website.

Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings...[The] community gets together largely through a website, a Yahoo group and via recordings on various labels such as Seattle's and/OAR records.

On the "Book" page, users can create a SoundTransit by choosing a location of departure and arrival, as well as several stopovers along the way. Based on your selections, an intinerary with details about the selected sounds and a soundfile are generated, which can be downloaded as an MP3 or sent to friends.

SoundTransit began with the project "Phonographic Migrations #3 Soundscape-FM," which was exhibited at the Garage Festival 2004 in Stralsund, Germany. This was followed in 2005 by the "Berlin.Soundscape-FM" website for Transmediale. For both projects, various artists were invited to contribute recordings made either all over the world [soundscape-fm] or within the city of Berlin [berlin.soundscape-fm]. These recordings were made available as an online database, a local FM radio broadcast and a webstream.

SoundTransit is inspired by the "Phonographic Migrations" series, coordinated by Yannick Dauby and Dale Lloyd and published on the labels and/OAR and Tiramizu. These projects enable participants to share sound information about their environments through divergent channels, and consequently to enact a collective soundscape that is materialized into a publication or a public event, physical or on-line. There is no copyright on the "Phonographic Migrations" concept, and anyone is free to initiate a similar project.