The Sound Outside – Listening to the world at Covid-19 Time

Call for participation to sound designers from all over the world

Currently, the only way to fight Covid-19 is to stay at home. The world around us is changing rapidly and the sounds associated with life are also changing. This call is open to all sound designers, sound artists, field recordists and music producers who are interested in capturing the soundscape of their surroundings recording outside their windows.

The goal is to gather and make public a collective sound archive dedicated to soundscapes of as many places in the world as we can, in this strange time when cities and whole countries and in lockdown due to Covid-19. New sounds emerge, others are recovered, others have been lost. Now through sound we can show a reality that is hidden from our eyes due to the forced reclusion to fight the virus.

If you are a sound designer and you have the opportunity to record outside your window, we invite you to be part of this collective project.

The call is open to all levels of experience, age, genders, nationalities and anything else, across the globe.

Participation is free. It will allow us to feel closer.

It’s time to be united!

Submission of works

Deadline

Following multiple requests, we decided to keep accepting soundscapes submissions as long as they are recorded during lockdown – so please get in touch with us at submission@soundesign.info if you want to submit!

Material

• your audio file (wav or aiff at 44.1 kHz) with a soundscape from your window (around 5 minutes long)
• metadata including: location of the recording (GoogleMaps coordinates would be ideal), author, date and time, descriptive catch phrase like a slogan that highlights what struck you most about the sounds that surround you now. We will use it as the title of your entry.
• please include your social channels (Facebook page, Twitter…) if you want to be quoted when we’ll share your work.
• three lines of biography
• a cover image in landscape mode (horizontal), possibly taken from the same window. If you can, please send something at 1280 x 720 pixel.

Submissions and accompanying material must be sent with a download link from WeTransfer, Google Drive, Dropbox to submission@soundesign.info. Likewise, for any further questions, please don’t hesitate to emailing us.

By submitting your work, you grant us permission to store it and make it available through The Sound Outside archive and possible related research. All rights stay with you, the artist/author. 

The world is changing and we are listening!

Last soundscapes

Podcast series with the authors

We asked the authors to share their thoughts on what sound means for humans, how the pandemic changed the urban soundscape and finally how we can contribute to design a better one for the next future.

A project ideated and curated by Valeria Caputo together with Sara Lenzi, happily hosted by sounDesign.

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Sara Lenzi

Sound Activist, Human-Data Interaction Researcher at Density Design Lab

Sara Lenzi is the co-founder of sounDesin.info. A sound activist, she has fifteen years of experience in sound design for branding with incursions in sound art. She writes about all the multifaceted aspects of sound in communication. She is an international lecturer and founder of Lorelei Sound Strategies, the first sound branding boutique studio in Singapore, where she lived between 2011 and 2017. Sara has a Master Degree in Philosophy and she is currently defending her PhD in Data Sonification at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design.

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Latest posts by Sara Lenzi (see all)

• The Sound Outside – Podcast series with the authors - June 1, 2020
• From silence, listen to the future - April 13, 2020
• The Sound Outside – Listening to the world at Covid-19 Time - March 28, 2020