In 1998, Peter Cusack, a sound artist who currently lives and works between London and Berlin, began a project called Favourite Sounds. Behind it lay a simple premise: that he would record his favourite locational sounds. The project asked for nothing spectacular, but for sounds that were defined by their very ordinariness. An album, Your Favourite London Sounds, followed three years later – it included the hubbub of various markets, the ding-ding ring of a double-decker bus, the chimes of Big Ben, a key turning in the door. Taken together, each, in its own quiet way, went to create a tapestry of life and with it a sensory immediacy that speaks to both resonance and memory. It’s what Cusack calls ‘sonic journalism’ and it is a way of working that has taken him from recording city sounds across the world to, most recently, the landscapes around the Aral Sea in central Asia.
‘Sonic journalism is the equivalent of photo-journalism,’ he comments. ‘While images give you extra information to the written text, the addition of a sonic dimension provides even more material. Sound is sensory and so it is more immediate and immersive.’
