Phonogram documents places through their sound — from a Svaneti beech forest in heavy rain to the inside of a cello in a Tbilisi workshop, from the Schönhauser Allee platform at 06:14 to the hull of a drifting boat in the Østfold coast.
Recording, at its best, is an act of attention. These limits are not aesthetic preferences — they are what keep the work honest, year after year.
Every recording in the archive was captured on location, by hand, by one of us. We do not build sound from samples, and we do not synthesize environments. If we cannot be there, we do not record it.
— Studio rule 1, written 2011.
We trim long tails of room tone at the start and end of a take. We do not apply reverb, EQ, compression, or noise reduction to the captured signal. What was in the air stays in the file.
— Studio rule 4. Catalog entries note any field gain-staging.
A recording is a document, not a clip. Each archive entry is the complete unedited capture with its full metadata — location, chain, weather, time, and the name of the person who held the microphone.
— Studio rule 7. Exception: the Short Take series, labelled as edited highlights.
The microphone is not a more sensitive ear. It is a different animal, and it hears a different world. The work is not in capturing what we hear — it is in learning what the thing actually sounds like.Margrit Rösch, field notes, 2018. Interior of a violin, Mitte workshop.
A small sample of the 1,247 recordings held in the archive. Full catalogue with complete metadata is available to researchers on request.
| # | Title & location | Duration | Format | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 047 | Rondane interior — June melt Norway · 61°12′N 10°18′E · 1,270 m | 00:48:22 | 24-bit · 48kHz | Live capture |
| 046 | U-Bahn Schönhauser Allee, 06:14 Berlin · Arnimplatz platform | 00:14:07 | 24-bit · 48kHz | Archived |
| 045 | Interior — cello, luthier's workshop Tbilisi · Chokhatauri St. | 00:22:41 | 24-bit · 96kHz | Archived |
| 044 | Rain on beech canopy, Svaneti Georgia · Ushguli · 2,100 m | 01:03:15 | 24-bit · 48kHz | Archived |
| 043 | River Tergi at halti bridge Georgia · 42°19′N 42°48′E | 00:31:08 | 24-bit · 48kHz | Archived |
Entries are numbered by date of capture, not title. Full metadata for each entry — weather, chain, operator, notes — is held in the archive ledger and available on request.
Phonogram accepts two kinds of work: commissions for new field recordings, and research access to the archive. We do not license recordings for commercial use without a project agreement.
For commissions: describe the place, the reason, and the output you need. We respond within ten working days.
For archive access: state the research question and the entries you are interested in. We hold the full catalogue internally; most requests can be answered from the sample on this page.