'Immersive' project collects and saves soundscapes of world heritage sites

The sounds of wind turbines, whales and the Amazonian dawn chorus are among the noises being preserved as part of an exhibition of soundscapes from world heritage sites.

- Sinead Campbell

The Sonic Heritage project is an online collection of 270 sounds from 68 countries, including from famous Unesco-designated sites such as Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal, as well as natural landscapes such as the monarch butterfly sanctuary in El Rosario, Mexico, and the Colombian Amazon.

"When you think of world heritage sites, you always think of visuals, but there's almost no attention paid to the way these heritage sites sound," said Stuart Fowkes, the creator of Cities and Memory, one of the world's largest archives of field recordings.

"The incredible thing about sound is that it's so immersive and it can drop you into the experience of being in a place in a way that visuals and photography, and to some extent videos, can't," said Fowkes.