listening to Annea Lockwood’s “River Maps”

Is there something particularly nourishing about the sound of moving water? Composer Annea Lockwood thought so. In the 1980s, she began assembling audio archives of rivers she came across during her travels. She made her first “sound map” of the Hudson River, and went on to record many other famous rivers. “I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real time,” she said. “I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks.”