The Sound Weaver's Incantation [Cities and Memory]

The Sound Weaver's Incantation [Cities and Memory]

From Art, in all the wrong places by M. Cristina Marras

February 28, 2026 · 5 min · Episode 68

About this episode

The episode explores the magical experience of discovering a sound recording from the Central African Republic and its connection to ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno.

Sometimes magic finds you when you least expect it. That's exactly what happened when, among the many sounds from the Pitt Rivers Museum, I stumbled upon a recording of a night forest in the Central African Republic. I was immediately drawn to the sound because it felt magical. Without even reading the description to know the background of the sound, where it came from or how it came about, I selected it as a basis for my creation, trusting my intuition to guide me toward something special. The Sound Weaver's Incantation is part of Cities and Memory 's A Century of Sounds ,an ambitious project celebrating the Pitt Rivers Museum 's extraordinary audio heritage. This global collaboration brings together artists, collectors, and listeners to reimagine historical and contemporary field recordings, creating new sonic landscapes that honour the past while embracing the present. As an artist who often searches through recorded sounds for inspiration to tell personal stories, I expected this to be just another backdrop for my reflections. But this time it ended up being different. As I began reading about the origin of the sound, chosen purely for its magical quality, I found myself lost…

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