"...the world's cities painted with sound."

A few weeks ago I finished Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities. The book is centered around a fictionalized series of conversations that take place between the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, and the explorer Marco Polo. Polo has been hired by the great Khan to travel around his empire and describe to him its cities. Kublai Khan, with few years left, wants to understand the empire he has created, and of all his advisers he shows the most interest in the stories Polo has to tell. The book contains the descriptions of 55 cities but fairly quickly the Khan realizes that Polo is actually describing the same city over and over again. I'm not sure how far I can go into explaining the plot of a book before I begin to ruin it, so I'll stop there since it's irrelevant to what I want to say anyway (plus, for much better plot summaries go here or here).

After I finished the book I went online to see if I could find a relevant discussion group and stumbled onto something even better. An electronic music label, Fällt, has created something called the Invisible Cities Project. Artists in 24 different cities around the world were asked to make 5-minute field recordings in order to paint pictures of those cities using sound. I listened to a few of them and think the idea is brilliant, even if the execution on a few fell flat.

The Invisible Cities Project can be found on the Fällt website or simply follow this link. If you use the link provided, the recordings can be found by clicking on the grid about halfway down the page on the right. The Moscow and Delhi recordings were cool, not so much for Tokyo.