Explore the 3D Sounds of Your Favorite Cities

The sounds of Central Park's Bethesda Arcade include the chatter of passersby and the instrumentals of street musicians.

Each city has its soundtrack—a cacophonous music composed of the din of everyday life bustling through the streets. This music is part of what makes urban life so exciting; it adds vigor to the character and spirit of your favorite neighborhoods. The Sound City Project is an attempt to archive those sounds and map them out; site users can explore the sounds the same way they might navigate Google Street View.

A project by David Vale in collaboration with Rick van Mook and Caco Teixeira, the Sound City Project is an attempt to document the “feeling” of city life through a collection of “3D sounds” captured by a custom-made soundhead audio recorder. The soundhead records dynamic sounds via four omnidirectional microphones—the final product is a textured soundtrack that places you aurally in the center of major cities around the world. Already, the trio has archived sounds from 64 different sites in six different cities located everywhere from California to Sweden.