Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
66 I M PS E . O R G but key workers were told to 'Stay at Home,' my wife Michelle and I started home-schooling our two children, Toby and Isadora. Michelle focused on our 13-year-old autistic son at the dining table, whilst I spent my time with our 11-year-old daughter in my studio at the end of the garden. The weather in London at the beginning of the lockdown was unseasonably warm, allowing us to work with the studio doors wide open and listen to the spring birds. In-between helping Isadora with her online lessons, I started to do what all sound editors promise themselves they'll do when they have some downtime—get on with mastering the hours of recordings that had been building up over the years from various recording trips. The first task I set for myself was to tackle the hours of crowd recordings I had amassed during 2019. Throughout that year, the UK had demonstrations against Brexit, proroguing parliament, climate change, Trump ... you name it, if there was large crowd shouting and chanting in London that year, you would have found me out and about recording it. Looking back on it now, spending so much of 2019 in huge crowds couldn't have been more dissimilar to what was to come in 2020. I started listening through the sounds and logging them as quietly as I could into a Pro Tools session, trying not to disturb my daughter whilst she was getting on with working on her math, English, science, geography, and fairly regularly YouTube. In-between listening to shouts, chants, and yells from the protests, I went through my library and played sounds that my daughter wanted to listen to. From bird tweets and marketplace chatter, to city ambiences and waves crashing on beaches. Having already discussed with her the changes in the background noise we were noticing in London, we wondered how other places around the world could be sounding during lockdown, and whether that sonic change was as extreme for them as it was for us. We listened back to recordings I