I usually play jazz piano, but on this particular day I was camping with my family — my wife, our two-year-old son, and our two medium-sized Japanese dogs. When I woke up, the scenery and the birdsong were so beautiful that I felt compelled to record the soundscape, and I naturally began playing piano along with it.

Birdsong in Suwa District, Japan reimagined by Daisuke Matsubara.

This sound is the call of a bird we heard while camping with our family in the morning.
It comes from a region that is usually covered in snow, but this was recorded during the pleasant climate of May in Japan.

Recorded by Daisuke Matsubara.

"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train drivers that helped facilitate the horrors of the holocaust (some of them still working those same lines when the movie was made in the 70’s and 80’s) and those with the farmers and local people who bore witness to the trains that have the most impact. The sheer matter-of-factness of their recounting; the lack of compassion, the smiles and shoulder shrugging. The banality of genocide.

"After I’d watched Shoah, I felt as though something inside of me had been broken. From childhood I had grown up with the idea of this as the worst of human crimes, the word holocaust, alone, meant to pause for breath. Now here was the shock of seeing people involved with and witness to it writing it off as just another thing that happened in the course of a day of work. It was a shock, though, that came accompanied by an uncomfortable realisation that of course that’s how it was: for evil to be committed on such a huge scale it couldn’t have been any other way.

"The ‘Final Solution’ was a railway operation run to a timetable. It was: mechanics, logistics, coke and steam. Wagoning, shunting, shovelling and coaling. Rubber stamps and forms in triplicate. Cold, logical, every day planning.

"I used locomotive sounds and looped them.

"There’s a legend that there are no birds at Auschwitz but I imagined gazing up high and longing to escape. I have also read about how the inmates began to see the contrails of the American bombers late in the war. I can’t imagine what that must have meant to them. I can’t imagine how much hope they still held onto after everything that they had experienced.

"I imagined a folk song, sang it and then reprised its melody like a memory of the singer gone.

"In his book The Truce, Primo Levi recounts that the very worst thing said to the inmates by the camp guards was that even if by a miracle some of them survived the camp it wouldn’t matter, because the perpetrators were going to destroy all of the evidence and hide it all from the world and nobody that the survivors tried to tell about it would ever believe any of it was true.

"It is the duty of every one of us as human beings to make sure that that prophecy is never allowed to come to pass."

Birkenau Gate, Auschwitz soundscape reimagined by Jon Griffin.

"The source sound is open to interpretation but to me it sounds like I'm in the woods. I used a quote from Dante’s Inferno in it as spoken word whilst maintaining the original source sound in the background. It's about expecting things that should be in place by midlife but the realisation they're not; you’re lost in the woods (metaphorically); there are many paths to go by, and what one might think and hope is permanent is not.

"All things are temporary and transitory in nature, and the realisation of that (usually in mid to late life) is something we all face, whether it be bereavment or failed relationships/friendships for example. I have personally felt this way many times - like I’m lost in the woods. I decided to shift to a more dubstep genre, which represents moments of anger & frustration amidst the quieter sections, which are more contemplative. "

Dawn chorus in Antipolo City, Philippines reimagined by Jaspal Bhogal.

"The feel of the song was inspired by the slow joy of the ambient sounds in the field recording, and the rhythmic sound of the waves. Praia Vermelha is at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, and after researching the place, it also became important to the song.

"The lyrics include a line about Henrietta Carstairs, the first known person to climb the mountain in 1817. The field recording continues throughout, connecting the present moment with the history of the area and all the mountain has seen."

Praia Vermelha, Rio de Janeiro reimagined by Sairie.

A five minute recording is all it takes to tell what time day and year it is at home. Natural sounds like backyard native birds like Collared Kingfisher, Philippines Pied Fantail, Zebra doves, and Yellow-vented Bulbuls are busy asserting their territory and finding food in the morning before it gets too hot.

Migratory birds like Gray Wagtail, Arctic Warbler, and Ashy Minivet mean that it's sometime during their busy winter migration. Human sounds also provide great clues. People sweep streets by hand with a local broom called walis tingting before it gets too hot and motorcycles rev past during the busy rush hour.

Recorded in Antipolo City, Philippines by Janina Castro.

This is the second edition of a recording I've made in the 2024 summer afternoon at the beach. It was made at Praia Vermelha (Red Beach), Urca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a hot weather, the beach was crowded: children, families, young and elder people, vendors selling drinks and refreshments (water, cold mate, coconut water, popsicle, and so on). People are talking, laughing, shouting. Waves are breaking continuously on the sand.

Recorded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Marcelo Carneiro de Lima.