Suoni di Bologna (Sounds of Bologna) is a collaborative sound mapping  project for the city of Bologna (IT), it is organized and managed by Sounday (association for Sound Design). The project aims to tell a sensitive noise map. Field recordings bear witness to events and lifestyle of the inhabitants and document the soundscape of the city. In recognition of the ephemeral nature of the sound, Sounday’s methodology is oriented towards a holistic approach. “It tries to reconstruct, through listening, an acoustic atlas of the city which has the effect of a moment stolen from time to return the feeling of a living otherwise possible. Audio tracks contain few minutes of real life, sometimes difficult to identify in absence of other sensory parameters. For this reason, this witness of reality becomes abstract. Listening to the acoustic recordings we can refer to another place that exists only in our mind.

Even when we have witnessed the same recorded time-moment, our perception has surely recorded other sounds, other perceived connections. But, because this evidence is collected by a machine which by its nature can be neutral and receives and records each frequency without making personal selections, each fragment of reality is there to be listened several times.

The game of sensitive map is therefore the one of listening to the track several times and revisiting it as a puzzle that offers to the memory unknown nuances, recorded by the ear but never analysed by the mind, never related, never processed.

Hence, acoustic evidence in the sound map acquires a sense of rewind of the world.

Suoni di Bologna is hosted at http://www.freesound.org/people/suonidibologna/