Sounds of the Forest

Sounds of the Forest scatters crowdsourced woodland recordings across a global map. Pick a place and the usual cartographic facts give way to birds, weather, leaves, insects, and distant human traces. It began as a 2020 mass-participation project and also serves as a Creative Commons sound library for new work.

What is Sounds of the Forest?

The premise is beautifully literal: forests become points on a map, and each point opens an audio postcard recorded by someone who stood there and listened. That makes distance feel intimate. A woodland can arrive through one minute of rain, birdsong, creaking branches, or whatever else happened near the microphone. Wild Rumpus and Timber Festival built the project for public contributions, then extended the idea by commissioning musicians to respond to the shared recordings. The result sits comfortably between map, archive, field-recording album, and raw material cupboard.

What you can do there

• Choose a location on the soundmap
• Listen to a woodland recording
• Learn how to contribute or reuse sounds

Why we picked it

Most maps tell you what a place looks like or how to reach it; this one asks what arrives through your ears. The one-minute contribution format keeps the idea approachable, while the reuse terms let the collection travel into music and other creative work. Independent project documentation from PRS Foundation confirms that this was designed as participation first, not merely a decorative map layer.

How to get the most from it

Wear headphones, choose a region far from home, and let one clip finish before hopping to the next pin. Compare two forests with very different climates, then try one near your own latitude. If you plan to reuse a recording, open its details and verify the current item-level attribution and license requirements first.

Good to know

Audio is the point, so this is a poor silent-tab choice. The map, playback controls, transcripts, mobile behavior, accessibility, and current contribution flow were not exercised in this review, and no screenshot was captured. Protected capture also found unusually script- or iframe-heavy source, which is a technical caution rather than a confirmed safety failure.

Who made it, and when?

Wild Rumpus is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is July 3, 2020.