Interactive audio map plots the sounds of protests around the world
Protests often take shape in order to amplify the voices of activists and communities around the world. A new audio project is making sure those voices stay heard, long after the protests end.
"Protest & Politics," created by UK-based artist Stuart Fowkes, is an interactive map that marks the locations of noteworthy protests over time, along with field recordings from people who were there on the ground. The goal is to document and showcase how people voice dissent across the globe.
For each plot point you click on the map, you can hear the sounds of protests and demonstrations like the Women's Marches in New York and Los Angeles, a protest for Indigenous rights in Canada's Northwest Territories, an anti-austerity demonstration in Athens, Greece, and a Black Lives Matter protest in Philadelphia.
"What's great about this project is that it's little slices of history."
The project, which officially launched Monday as part of the larger global recording initiative Cities and Memory, sourced recordings from the site's own archive and field recordists around the world. It was also opened up to artists and musicians to "recompose and reimagine" protest sounds.
For example, someone took a recording of a protest against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Istanbul's Taksim Square, adding eerie sound samples as a backdrop. Another artist stretched and morphed sounds of "Her body, her choice" chants from an anti-Trump march into a percussive, heavily electronic song called "System Failure."
Fowkes, who is a digital consultant and musician living in Oxford, contributed 25 sounds himself from the UK, Germany, and Italy. He also created four remixes.
"What's great about this project is that it's little slices of history,” Fowkes told CityLab. "It's a small way of demonstrating to people that there is a kind of global solidarity around protest."
"Protest & Politics" mostly covers protests that took place over the past decade, but the map also includes a Washington, D.C., protest against the Gulf War in 1991. Many of the U.S. recordings are anti-Trump marches in 2016 and 2017, and several UK recordings focus on Brexit, reflecting the prevalence of political protests over the past year.
The map is by no means comprehensive, however. It doesn't appear to include, for example, the Arab Spring or #NoDAPL — two movements that definitely influenced political discourse and changed how people protest in the digital age.
Because it was subject to contributor submissions, "Protest & Politics" doesn't just include progressive protests. There's a right-wing anti-LGBTQ demonstration in Kraków, Poland, as well as pro-Trump demonstrations. But that didn't bother Fowkes, who thinks the project will teach listeners about similarities and differences among activists and protests.
"There's no such thing as a completely neutral, apolitical map; there never has been in the history of maps," he said. "I wasn't trying to create a completely representative picture of every protest that's taken place."
The map, and an accompanying playlist, features nearly 200 sounds in total, from more than 100 field recordists, sound designers, musicians, and sound artists.
"Sound can bring you back to a place or time in an instant in a way that probably only smell can rival," Fowkes told CityLab. "I think that's incredibly valuable."
You can listen to the full "Protest & Politics" playlist of sounds below, or visit the full map on the Cities and Memories website.
[H/T CityLab]
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Topics Activism Social Good Donald Trump
Matt Petronzio was the Social Good Editor at Mashable, where he led coverage surrounding social impact, activism, identities, and world-changing innovation. He was based at the New York City headquarters from January 2012 to April 2018, and previously worked as the assistant features editor.
