The Current - The sounds of humans moving across the world

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

A new audio project gathers the sounds of human migration, from the rhythm of a baby’s heartbeat to the sizzle of refugees cooking food, in a land far from home. Stuart Fowkes says his project aims to highlight the humanity in one of the most polarizing topics of our time.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. In Sissamut, Greenland, two Greenlanders prepare their dogs to go dog sledding. Thousands of years ago, Inuit migrated from Canada across the ice to Greenland by dog sled, and they continue dog sledding today. In Xinjiang, China, nomadic Kazakh herders travel in the deep mountains of Alte. Herders and their sheep scramble along a rocky pass.

From these traditional trails of migration to Hungary's hard line against migrants today, prison inmates feed metal tape through machines to make razor wire that will be used to fortify border fences against migrants and refugees. To a migration that embodies freedom in the natural world. In Mexico, monarch butterflies, thousands of them, on their long annual migration between Mexico and the United States. These sounds are part of the world's first global collection of sounds of migration. Stuart Fox is the lead behind the project. He's also the founder of the global sound project Cities and Memory.

He joins us from Oxford, England. Stuart, hello. Hello. You and I spoke about this, the work that you were doing when it came to documenting the sounds of cities and what the sounds can evoke in terms of our memories in those places. Tell me a little bit about moving toward the issue of migration and what you wanted to do with this collection of sound. So this is a project called Migration Sounds, which we've done in partnership with the Centre on Policy, Migration and Society at the University of Oxford.

So we're working together to present migration through a different lens, to present it through sound, to give a kind of different angle and different perspective on migration. So I think we're starting from the basic premise that migration is one of the most polarising topics in the world. It feels like many of the conversations aroundizing topics in the world it feels like many of the conversations around migration retread the same old ground it can sometimes feel like you need to be on one side of the debate or another and conversation can often start from quite an adversarial place when we're talking about migration but so we're trying here to use sound to encourage people to understand migration in a number of different ways and to use senses in this case hearing to kind of get a different type of knowledge about what's a really

a complex issue so you know for us when we were putting the collection of sounds together for this project hearing a family being reunited after many years apart or hearing the ultrasound of a baby's heartbeat recorded in a country thousands of miles from where you know its mother was born that tells a very different kind of story about migration and and it tells of tells it in a way that really brings it to life through the stories of people so it's kind of about getting away from from news coverage and cliche around migration and using sound as like a whole new entry point to the conversation and giving us all kinds of new perspectives on these stories tell me a bit more about that i mean mean, you're speaking to somebody who, you know,

uses sound for a living and talks for a living and listens for a living. What is it that you think that sound can do that you can't capture in those other, as you said, very heated, very polarized conversations around migration? Yeah, I mean, and similarly, you know, I work with sound all the time running the Cities in Memory sound project. And for me, sound is just an incredible gift. You know, it's, as a sense, it's incredibly close to all of us, we can all hear before we can see we can all hear before we're born. It's a sense that I think is very, very close to our daily lives. You know, our daily lives, if I ask you, you know, for example, what, what London looks like, you know, a typical answer might be what it looks like Buckingham palace or it looks like um whatever you know

something very visual if i ask you what london sounds like you're likely to say well maybe it's the sound of the metro doors closing or it's the sound of the bells of big ben or something like that if i use london as an example so when we talk about sound we often talk about it in a way that is much more intimate and closer to us so more than i think any other sense um you know except maybe smell sound can transport us really directly and really vividly into a situation in this case it can transport us directly into the lived experiences of human migration and drop you right into someone's story so you're kind of almost living it alongside them i think sound also helps us to ground our experience and it also really helps us and what's really important for this project is that migration is about the everyday lives,

everyday settling of countless millions of people all the way around the world. It is not just about arduous journeys across borders, it's about daily life for countless millions of people all over the world and everyone's story of migration is different but migration is just a of daily life. And I think that's part of what we're trying to bring to life with this project. I mean, it is one of the, to your point, one of the global issues of our time, the movement of people and how that shakes down. When you take a look at it through that perspective, how vast is this project? I mean, how many sounds, how many countries, who are the people who are contributing those sounds? Tell me a little bit about putting this thing together.

So the project covers 51 countries. It covers 120 sounds and they, we've got everything in, you know, you would, the entire spectrum of migration is effectively covered through sound in this project. So you've got everything from, you know, stories of, you know, daily life as an immigrant in countries all over the world being told through sound but you've got the dramatic sounds of like migrant rescues in the mediterranean you've got traditional ways of life you know so the top of the piece we were listening to nomadic kazakh herdsmen in china we were listening to inuit dog sleds in greenland so you've got those traditional ways of life there are migration related protests against you know migration laws or police brutality we've got the sounds of diaspora

communities and how different groups you know live in different countries and how they come together and build community in a place they're not necessarily from you've got the sounds of you know riots the sounds of people crossing borders but i think for me the sounds that are probably most emotional in the projects are those that are just every day and it's the story behind the sound that brings it to life so for example there are lots of sounds of traditional cookery or people picking up um you know traditional instrument and playing a song um in order to kind of calm the worries and to kind of bring a little piece of home to with them wherever they are so to me it's it's really about those individual stories that sit behind the sounds that really bring the magic here let's hear some of those

sounds this is from an ocean Viking rescue ship. So these are asylum seekers from West Africa. They've been rescued crossing the Mediterranean. Describe the scene that we're hearing. So this is a large group of rescuees. Almost all of them, as you say, are from West Africa. They're attempting to reach Europe. They were rescued in the middle of December about two in the morning on an overloaded boat in the middle of the Mediterranean. And this on board the ship, the Ocean Vikings, the rescue ship, they have this period that they on the ship refer to as the golden hour and what that means is people who have just been rescued they get the first rest

they've had in a very long time um you know maybe the shock dies down a little bit and they realize that actually physically they are safe for the first time in a long time and they just spontaneously just celebrate having survived the journey so they they grab drums that are kept on board the ship they sing they dance they make all of that incredible noise you were just hearing and it's a sound of just the pure joy of being alive and that is not something that comes across in the traditional portrayal of migration particularly in that context in in most news media just to hear the kind of the simple joy of you know of being alive and having survived a crossing like that it's just um it's a really emotional sound to hear.

Having survived is kind of a key point to this. I mean, tell me a little bit about the rescue, because we have seen, again, so many stories of those who are trying to cross the Mediterranean who have not made it or who have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult and precarious circumstances. So what do we know about this rescue in particular? Can I have one torch? Yes, can I have one torch? Yeah, so this sound, these sounds were recorded by a journalist called Frey Lindsay who submitted them to the project and, you know, he tells about how almost all of these rescues had suffered potentially extensive abuse in the countries they came from.

There were many children among them. So there were children between the ages of three and nine. There was one infant who's just weeks old. And they hadn't had any food or rest for a long time. And the boat was dangerously overcrowded. They were hundreds of kilometers north of Libya and this charity rescue ship, you know, rescued them and eventually disembarked them into northern Italy where they then entered the asylum system in Italy, you know, and were safe from harm.

You have audio as well of a migrant named Joseph and he You are safe! You are safe! You are safe! You have audio as well of a migrant named Joseph. And he's part of that journey in many ways. Fled Nigeria, got to Libya, and then, like so many, eventually got on a boat that was headed to Europe. We passed through hell just because we want better life. Just because we want freedom. Just because we need our kids and our mother and our brothers to be happy. That is why we take this risky journey.

It's between life and death. Only God knows where we came from. The water is not safe. But we have to embark in this journey. We pass through hell. What do you take from that? I mean, Joseph's story is just, it's an incredible story in which he describes suffering, extortion, robbery, detention, forced labor, and all kinds of other abuses during his time in Libya. And, you know, you think about this, the testimony of this one man, and you think about how many countless thousands, hundreds of thousands,

you know, of other people have similar stories of making journeys like this. But one of the things that Joseph talks, you know, really passionately about is the reason why he's making the journey, you know, to escape hardship as, you know, as an economic migrant and talking about the difficulties that he's living through that are unbearable in the country that he's from, and just really the human side of that story and you know you multiply that by you know by many thousands of times and you know it just really I think that the sound that you're hearing you know of him telling his story in his own words combined with those other sounds of the rescue itself of children playing with radio equipment on board the boat of the you know the

celebration the golden hour that we just talked about, it gives you a much richer picture. And it really kind of brings home those individual stories of migration, whether those are forced migration, or whether those are kind of, you know, settled migration. You mentioned at the very beginning, the polarization around this issue. And I mean, this is something that you hear around the world. I mean, whether it's those who are crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. In the United States, I was just down at the Arizona-Mexico border and met people who had traveled from Egypt, from Nepal, from Rwanda, from Mexico, who were searching for a better life.

And there is a huge push to turn those people away, to tighten the border, to ensure that they can't cross. And it speaks to that polarization. I just wonder how you see the pushback to this and how you see the tension around this issue. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the use of sound is around humanizing some of these stories. You know, it's subtle things that define the experience of migration. You know, it's subtle things that define the experience of migration. If you've got a chart showing annual migration or deportations, that is just a bulldozer of a figure. That's just a number that, you know, it can be very kind of crude to look at things at that level. Listening to sound gives people a deeper, a richer sense of what it actually means to migrate, what it might mean to lose one of your you know, loved ones to another place,

how it feels to escape danger, how it feels to actually feel at home in a new place for, you know, for the first time, all of these incredible subtleties and intricacies. And just this idea that migration is not just one thing. It is completely individual to every person that experiences it and goes through it, whether you're someone that's migrated yourself or whether you're someone that, you know, has friends or family members that whether you're someone that's migrated yourself or whether you're someone that you know has friends or family members that you know that have migrated or even you know migrated and come back it's individual for everybody and I think it's easy to lose that and to lose the human side of it in this polarizing debate that you know very frequently comes up through migration you know I think I really it's about the individuality and

about the um about that that kind of the personal stories that I think really come through in this project. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's listen to something else. Probably sounds familiar to a lot of people. That's a basketball game. What is significant about that recording, Stuart? So this recording is a group of filipino expats playing basketball in dubai so filipinos are something like one in four of the population in dubai and most of them come there to work to support families back home many of them eventually end up staying you know longer than that and one

of the most common activities that the particularly male filipinos in dubai take part in is basketball so you'll find the person that submitted this recording was telling us that every public that the particularly male Filipinos in Dubai take part in is basketball. So you'll find the person that submitted this recording was telling us that every public basketball court in the city is just filled with huge groups of enthusiasts. Every evening without fail, he always enjoys watching them play and enjoying the laughter and energy of how this has become an important part of Filipino culture and something they take with them wherever they go, including whether they're at home or whether they're in a place like Dubai. And I think it's one of those things where you're listening to an activity

that a group of people are passionate about and share, and whether they're sharing that in the country they're originally from or the country that they now call home, it's something that they take with them. And you see that time and again in this project. So example there's another recording arm in chinatown in in new york city where you're here in columbus park there's um you know a huge group of uh the chinese community there they come together every single weekend to play mahjong with one another to play traditional chinese musical instruments and it's like a kind of a home away from home and those

you know living those traditions and sharing those activities helps to build community in a new place we're going to keep spinning around the globe as we listen to these sounds this is this next recording is from Uganda. What are we hearing there? So this is a group of people called the Batwa people from Uganda. So for thousands of years, this group of people lived in a forest called the Buindi Impenetrable Forest in the southwest of Uganda. They were the indigenous people there. In 1992, this forest became a national park and a World Heritage Site in order to protect the mountain gorillas within its boundaries.

The Batwa were evicted from the park. They didn't have title to the land. They didn't receive any compensation. Today, many of those people have been rehoused on land just outside this national park. So this is um a recordist who went along to visit a group who were living in the countryside kind of near the park and this is um a welcome song that they that they sang um you know to to greet the visitors as they came in but their story is one of um of internal migration of internal forced migration um from

one place that they called home to another place so again it's just another angle on the migration story being told through you know through sound again in a very, very different way. And I think it's another illustration of the variety, not just geographically, but also of the different forms of migration that there are. One of the neat things that you're doing with this is that there are those sorts of field recordings, the recording just of the event itself, but you also have kind of reimagined or remixed sounds

with music and other things. I want to play a little bit of one of those. This is My Journey, My Ardas. I was born in India. And when I was about seven, my father took me to East Africa, you know. I think at that time, it was under the British rule.

East Africa means Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and a small island of Zanzibar. Stuart, tell me about that, what we're hearing, what's going on in that mix. So the second half of the Migration Sounds Project is that every single one of these field recordings has been handed to an artist or a sound artist or a musician somewhere in the world, and they have created a composition based on that original recording.

So every single one of those 120 sounds has got a mirror composition where an artist somewhere has made something out of that original recording in order to present another new perspective on the idea of migration. So that particular recording, that particular composition

was by an artist called Jasper Sing Bogal and he is reimagining a recording that I myself made inside a Sikh temple in London. So we were welcomed into a Sikh temple to record some of the prayers there that the Sikh diaspora community in London as part of their daily lives. This sound was chosen by Jasper

as his contribution to the project, and what he's done in that mix is he's taken the prayer as a core element but he's also sampled his elderly father's recollection of his own personal migration experience in the piece as well so you've got this dreamlike melodic kind of music going on there the recollections of his elderly father who himself has this migration experience blended in with the sounds of the you know the prayers from the Sikh community in London. So you get this multiple layering effect of memory upon memory and migration upon migration

that's been achieved through these artists getting involved. Many of the artists involved in doing that side of the project are also from a migrant background themselves, and some of them are bringing their own personal experiences and feelings about what it means to live as a migrant into the compositions and into the ways in which they've worked with these recordings. So it's a really multi-layered project, looking at the whole concept of migration from many different angles. It's interesting because all of those things could stand on their own, but when you bring them together, something else comes out, right? Exactly, yeah.

Listening to the recordings on their own gives you a new perspective on migration, but when you also have these compositions and you read the stories behind the compositions and you read the ways in which those sounds have stood out to the artists and the elements they've chosen to reflect on and respond with, then you have this great emotional response

to the whole concept of migration, and that's at the center of migration sounds, this idea that we can hopefully help people to just think about migration a little bit differently through opening themselves up not just the sounds but to the compositions that people have made from them as well life was very very difficult you know and it was a big struggle to survive, but I was young and never gave up, you know. And slowly I built my life in this country. Even in this polarized environment, I mean, one of the ways that people will connect with migration at an elemental kind of level is through food.

And the food we eat and the food we cook and the food that we share with other people. I'm going to end with one of those sounds from a kitchen and a shared meal. Every woman have a small secret. Yes. Yes. Okay. You're going to tell me a secret. Yes. Okay. You're going to tell me the secret? Yes.

Of course. One moment. And my secret is be happy. I sound like a master chef. Yes, you are. And it's making beautiful sounds. So I'm going to read the description of this.

These are the sounds of my Ukrainian housemate Natasha making borscht. Natasha is a refugee from war in Ukraine, has lived with me for almost two years now. We've become fast friends and learned a lot from each other, not just about cooking. The percussion of chopping, the melody of bubbling, the laughter of delight. Who is Natasha and who is the woman who's telling the story? So the story is being told by a recordist called Maria Margaronis she lives in london and um you know as you just read out there she's describing the fact that she now has um a ukrainian housemate um a refugee from the war who lives with her and you know

what amazing friends they've become um and the time they spend together and it's a real reminder of also you know the um as well as you've got the i guess the pain of separation for natasha from being away from home because of conflict but but she also has new friends, new experiences. Maria has a new friend as a result, and there is this positivity in that side of daily life as a migrant. And one of the things that actually surprised me with this project is the prominence of cookery in some of the sounds. It's really, you know, there were four, five, six different recordings

of people just cooking meals in different circumstances and describing how they use that to, for example, make a soup to feel close to their parents or to, you know, to share a borscht at home with their, you know, Ukrainian housemaid. And, for example, you know, I was recording the cooking of traditional pierogi in a Polish kitchen in London and all these kinds of things that the cooking and food and traditional dishes are just a they're a huge part of um of who we all are and wherever we travel in the world we kind of we take those experiences with us and you know in what we eat as much as what we say what we do and how we spend our time has doing this changed how you think about migration i mean i ask this in part because as i said this is one of the big issues of our time and we talk often about numbers and we'll talk about the millions of people who are on the move and where they might be on the move from or to and some of the politics around that. But when you are doing this work in this intimate way through the intimate medium of sound, has that changed how you think about the issue yourself? Yeah, I think it's broadened my conception, I think, of what migration is, what it means to be a migrant, what migration can mean, what it can become.

You know, I always go into these projects as, you know, in as open minded a way as possible. This is not an overtly political project in any way. This is not a project that has a particular perspective on migration. on migration this is a project that very openly said we are looking to represent the experiences of migration whatever they might be through sound in order to just open up new ways into the conversation i think you know it really successfully does that but we didn't go out with a particular agenda and and to me thinking um wow we've we've put this project together we've covered 51 countries not only have we managed to you know record those sounds of migration like you know dramatic rescue boats in the mediterranean or razor wire being built to you know to strengthen border fences we've also recorded these amazing moments like a family reunion eight thousand

miles from home where you've got the very moment that people who hadn't seen each other for three four five years kind of come together again for the first time where you've got housemates from different countries kind of just relating to one another to me it's all about migration is just daily life and um the the breadth of it is is astonishing and i really hope that that's what this project can can show people and they can just help people to to just listen to the world a little bit differently migration is daily life that's a really powerful way of thinking about it. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's what I'm kind of taking away from this.

And it's one of the things that sound has helped me to understand, you know, is that if we can just help people to listen to the world a little bit differently through some of these sounds and through some of these competitions, then maybe we can, using that as a starting point, help people to think about the world a little bit differently as well. Your work is fascinating and makes us hear the world in different ways. Stuart, thanks again for speaking with us. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. Stuart Fox is the founder of the global sound project Cities & Memory.

Their latest project, Migration Sounds, can be found on their website, citiesandmemory.com. Such a neat idea. And again, no surprise, he says on the radio, that hearing things can make you think differently, perhaps, about that subject.