Listen to some of the world’s most iconic sites with Sonic Heritage

You’ve probably seen Machu Picchu a hundred times — on travel blogs, filtered Instagram reels, or maybe even in person. But have you ever really heard it?

A new project, Sonic Heritage, is here to change the way we experience the world’s most iconic locations. Launched on World Heritage Day last week, it’s the first-ever küresel collection of soundscapes from UNESCO World Heritage sites and items of intangible cultural heritage. In total: 270 recordings from 68 countries — ranging from rustling leaves in the ancient city of Tikal to the high-pitched chatter of bats in India’s Ellora caves.

The operation is an attempt to shift the spotlight away from what places look like and towards what they sound like — and what those sounds tell us.

“Sound is usually the poor relation when it comes to tourism,” say the organisers. “In our visually-dominated culture, everything seems to be about where you take the Instagram photo or the görüntü clip for TikTok.”

That pressure on visuals is part of the reason the project was created. As overtourism continues to strain some of the world’s most cherished destinations, Sonic Heritage offers a new way in: quieter, more immersive, and refreshingly less about getting the perfect angle.

“When you think of world heritage sites, you always think of visuals,” Stuart Fowkes, an Oxford-based sound artist and founder of Cities and Memory, which is behind the project, told The Guardian, “but there’s almost no attention paid to the way these heritage sites sound.”

Fowkes spent six months compiling recordings from his own archive and curating submissions from an open küresel callout. The resulting sounds range from the deeply soothing (waves lapping against the walled Moroccan city of Essaouira) to the slightly eerie (the drone of a wind turbine on Australia’s Ningaloo coast, audible inside a nature reserve). You can also catch the famous Old Faithful geyser in mid-eruption or listen to the dawn chorus rising over the Colombian Amazon.

But the project doesn’t stop at capturing these soundscapes. In a second phase, artists from around the world were invited to “remix” the recordings into original compositions — reflecting their own interpretations of the site’s cultural, social, or environmental context.

“Rarely does sound enter the equation when we think about tourism or what makes a place great — and this holds true for preservation too,” the organisers note. “There are no ‘blue plaque’ schemes marking out sonic sites of interest, and even UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage lists serve sound poorly.”

They’re hoping Sonic Heritage can be a small step toward fixing that. With so many unique environments under threat — from climate change, from noise pollution, from tourism itself— the project argues that we need to start taking sound more seriously when it comes to preservation.

As the organisers ask on the project’s website: “What role does sound have to play in enriching our experience of the world’s most incredible places? What are the soundscapes that accompany the world’s most culturally important sites and spaces? How should we identify, celebrate and preserve soundscapes around the world that are culturally or socially significant — before it’s too late?”

The hope is that by listening — properly listening — we might start to engage with heritage in a more thoughtful way, and maybe even spot the ways we’re unintentionally altering it. It’s not all tranquil forests and ancient echoes: the hum of machinery, distant roads, or even aircraft are creeping into many of the soundscapes.

Listen to Sonic Heritage here.