Sounds of the city

Cities And Memory may have been running for five years, but the project has really come into its own in the last couple of months - for obvious reasons. Stuart Fowkes - a fellow former Nightshift writer who also happens to be behind Oxford's excellent Audioscope music festival - set out to collect field recordings from urban areas around the globe, but could surely never have imagined the present moment: "a really unique time when the world is sounding like it's never sounded before", he told the Guardian's Lanre Bakare.

Traffic noise - both on the roads and in the skies - has plummeted, but our cities aren't completely silent. Even a deserted Times Square at the height of New York's coronavirus crisis hummed with "an air-conditioning drone". As Fowkes noted, "One of the few positives from this situation is that people are starting to reconnect with nature a little bit and starting to notice the sounds that are usually drowned out around them". Stop to listen and you'll hear what he means.