- Sonic Heritage is the first major platform collecting sound recordings from UNESCO World Heritage sites.
- The project launched in April featuring over 270 UNESCO World Heritage Sites recordings from 68 countries.
- Stuart Fowkes, a leading sound artist, guides this project.
- Sounds capture everything from bustling cities to untouched nature.
- The project encourages a deeper, slower kind of travel experience.
- Audio scenes enable tourists to sense history and culture in new ways.
Travelers know the feeling: snapping photos of the Acropolis, the Colosseum, or Machu Picchu only captures a small slice of the story. With Sonic Heritage, tourists gain access to something pictures can’t give—a full sense of place through sound. As the world rushes to document trips with flawless images for social media, Sonic Heritage shifts the focus to the other half of the experience: listening.
Sonic Heritage, created by sound artist Stuart Fowkes and his team, launched in April. It is the world’s first broad collection of audio from UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The platform already features over 270 soundscapes from 68 countries.
Sonic Heritage stands out by preserving what makes each site unique beyond its appearance. Stuart Fowkes puts it simply: “If I talk to you about the Colosseum or about Machu Picchu, you can instantly conjure up an image of what that looks like in less than a second in your mind’s eye. But if I ask you what that sounds like, that’s another question.”
Listening Instead of Looking: What Sonic Heritage Captures
Step into this project and you’ll find more than a soundtrack. Each recording paints a layered scene. From the chatter in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia to the rhythmic beat of Chinese drums at Beijing’s Forbidden City, the sounds speak of culture, memory, and daily life.
- The hum of voices fills Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
- Cairo’s Islamic Quarter is alive with vendor calls and car horns.
- In Havana, maracas and street chatter fill the air with local character.
- The Colosseum in Rome buzzes with guides’ stories that echo through time.
- The Tower of London’s history leaks as crows caw over its walls.
Nature isn’t left out, either. Sonic Heritage sharply highlights the rustling leaves of Tikal’s ancient forests in Guatemala, the chirping birds of Mount Kenya, and even the low drone of wind turbines in Australia.
“There is a real surprise in how some of these sites actually sound. Some of that is related to the natural acoustics of the space and some of it is related to the sheer amount of people that are being crammed into that space,” Fowkes explains. He adds, “This project doesn’t just aim to highlight the beauty of some of these sounds… It also seeks to highlight some of the ways in which the presence of tourists affects those spaces through sound.”
The Story Behind the Sounds
Stuart Fowkes, based in Oxford, UK, leads this cultural project. With more than 15 years in field recording and sound art, Fowkes is best known for “Cities and Memory,” a platform launched in 2015 to document the world’s soundscapes. He now guides not only Sonic Heritage, but also collaborations across continents. His work appears in international exhibits, and he presents at conferences across Europe. Live performances featuring Sonic Heritage combine real-time sounds and visuals, giving audiences a multisensory travel experience.
A recent piece for the project highlights the work behind each audio sample. Fowkes describes it: “The composition, which has been made by an artist called Formolo, is all about the idea of time and the idea that this is a time-consuming, manual labor kind of practice. So he’s taken elements of the original field recording… used different lengths of time within the composition to really speak to this idea that this is a time-consuming process.”
Why Sonic Heritage Matters for Tourists
The platform isn’t just a digital archive—it’s an invitation. Fowkes believes, “Sound is such an immersive sense that you’re kind of missing out on half the picture by just regarding these sites as postcards. And you’re missing out on half the experience of being there.”
Travelers who listen can go deeper. Sonic Heritage encourages them to pause, absorb, and make space for wonder through vision and tuning into the sounds that shape a place. Even for those who may never set foot at Tikal or the Tower of London, these recordings offer a genuine way to connect.
As Fowkes says, “I think the thing about sound is, it is enormously transformative. It places you into a moment and into an experience in a way that almost no other sense does. It places you into the experience of being in that place in a way that looking at a photograph or sometimes even looking at a video just won’t allow you to do. So sound is incredibly close to us as a sense. We can all hear before we’re born. And sound is something that really sits very close to our everyday lives.”
Sonic Heritage opens a new door for travel—one where a sense of place is felt as much through the ear as the eye. For more on this evolving perspective, visit PBS NewsHour’s feature.
