Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
requested of them, the most interesting recordings were those from city centre locations where the change, due mainly to people working from home, was a lot more noticeable. One submission that really shocked me was from Will Cohen, a sound designer from London. He had gone out on an incredible recording trip to what would usually be the busiest areas of the city, not only capturing the sounds of these locations, but also taking some photographs of deserted streets to accompany them. As a Londoner, these were some of the most eerie and surreal of the whole project to my ears. Places I'd known as busy and bustling my whole life, were suddenly empty. During the very early stages of the lockdown, a key worker friend of mine, Anthony, was allowed to travel in and around London as normal. He kindly took my handheld Zoom recorder with him on a couple of commutes to the financial area of the city, which when trading as normal has a daytime population of an amazing sonic documentation of the lockdown, so we tried to work out other ways to get more people involved. I trawled through my contacts, asking sound editors and production mixers I knew if they could help spread the word and point a microphone out of their window to capture what they were hearing. Sounds began to arrive from people with a wide variety of backgrounds. We had submissions from a group of students at the Amsterdam Film Academy, thanks to Jillis Molenaar, their sound design teacher. Other recordings came from composers, sound artists, all the way up to double Oscar-winning production mixer Chris Munro. Before certain sections of the population started to rebel against the restrictions that had been more than half a million people. One of his recordings from Liverpool Street Station, a place with an average of 200,000 passengers per day, was just the sound of a lonely set of footsteps clicking across the huge polished concourse whilst an announcement to seemingly no one reverberated around the cavernous space. The recording itself is great, but is given a whole new feeling when you know that it was captured at 6 p.m. on a Thursday—the height of the rush hour. Another city where recordings were really highlighting the isolation that people were experiencing was Amsterdam. Having visited there and knowing the more touristy city centre with its narrow streets, cafes, and canals, the recordings from Bouk Bouwmeester, Zita Leeman, and Bente van der Spek, all captured the strange and eerie silence they were witnessing, only being broken by the historic church bells echoing around the tall buildings of the deserted streets. It wasn't just quiet and surreal ambiences that were being submitted. Another set of sounds that were coming in from around the world, " As a Londoner, these were some of the most eerie and surreal of the whole project to my ears. Places I'd known as busy and bustling my whole life, were suddenly empty. " Trafalgar Square, London. Photo courtesy Will Cohen