A soundmap of the world in lockdown
A soundmap of the world in lockdown

Last March, British composer Pete Stollery had a sound idea.

The professor of electroacoustic music and composition at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, reached out via social media and asked people to send in recordings of ways in which their everyday soundscapes had changed amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Stollery has received 241 recordings from 24 countries so far — 170 of these from the UK, 34 from mainland Europe and 51 from the rest of the world, including the US, Canada, Japan and Australia.

Submissions are still rolling in and Stollery is logging them one by one.

Many are now audible on his Google Earth sound map, a sonic memory of a unique time, preserved for posterity.