‘Sound Photography’ Project Gives Photographs a Soundtrack

Have you ever looked at a photo and almost immediately heard sounds associated with your visual stimulus? The sound of the waves are crystal clear when staring at a photo of a sunny coast perhaps? Now, thanks to the Sound Photography project, you can experience a photo both visually and audibly.

Composer Stuart Fowkes came up with the “City and Memory” project in 2014 as a “global collaborative sound project.” For “Sound Photography,” Fowkes asked volunteers from all across the globe to send in their photos. He put the photos in a database and afterwards, sound artists created compositions based on how the images made them feel.

In an interview with The Verge, Fowkes spoke about why sound is so compelling and so important when coming together with an image:

The second is about helping people think differently about the world around them and how they listen to it. You can take a sound that’s pretty dull — say, the metro in Brooklyn. That’s something you hear every day and would consider to be part of the background. If you take that and turn it into a piece of techno or piano music, you present it in a lot of different ways and you start to get people to think differently. The project isn’t just about “remarkable” sounds like volcanos or political protests. It’s also about the very humdrum, almost boring sounds that are still fascinating in their own way.

The project contains a sound map of recordings from around the world and to this date, it covers over 75 countries with contributions from over 500 artists.