Sounds to be protected: 20 years of Freesound

Created in 2005 by the Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University, Freesound has become one of the world’s largest open sound archives. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the CCCB presents Sounds to Be Protected — a sound installation curated by the Freesound team and artist Fito Conesa. The work reflects on the fragility of sound and its role as intangible heritage, inviting visitors to listen deeply and consider how our everyday soundscapes might one day disappear.

Each playlist below was assembled by a different artist or collective, revisiting sounds contributed to Freesound over the past twenty years. Together they form a living archive of shared listening, collaboration, and sonic memory.

Cabinets of Curiosities by Cedrik Fermont

Cedrik Fermont presents a sound collection that acts as an archive of memory and history. It includes recordings that evoke life moments, daily activities, and natural landscapes, some captured with technologies on the verge of disappearance. The selection gathers sounds from around the world, including personal tapes and intimate records. The playlist reflects on the loss of soundscapes, species, languages, and cultures. It includes a Ukrainian song as a symbol of resistance and hope, imperceptible sounds like ants walking on contact microphones, and acoustic comparisons before and after the pandemic. It is a cabinet of sonic curiosities that invites us to listen to what often goes unnoticed.

DE·HIERARCHIZING ACOUSTIC HERITAGE by Acoustic Heritage Collective

The Acoustic Heritage Collective proposes rethinking heritage from a sonic perspective. The selected sounds come from Freesound and are organized without hierarchy. The very act of recording and sharing already gives value to soundscapes. The playlist raises questions about auditory memory, collective identity, and the aesthetic value of everyday spaces. A room, a corridor, or a parking lot can be as meaningful as a monument. Acoustic heritage is fragile and only exists if it is listened to.

De cop i volta potser trobo a faltar un so by Albert Murillo

This playlist reflects on sonic nostalgia and the gradual disappearance of sounds that once shaped our everyday lives. Albert Murillo invites us to listen to the sounds that often go unnoticed but, once gone, leave an emotional void. Street sounds, work noises, and analog technologies have been replaced by new, flatter, and more impersonal sonorities. The project explores how the soundscape evolves with society, and how climate change and technological transformation contribute to the extinction of certain sounds. It is a call to preserve acoustic memory and to recognize the emotional value of the sounds that surround us.

Dubbing Memories by cantdefine.me

This playlist connects recordings of ancestral rhythms and rituals between Africa and Abya Yala to build a living archive of sonic resistance. Sound becomes a trace of heritage, a witness of destruction and transformation, and activates a spiritual memory that transcends time. The project reclaims the value of sound as a vehicle of resistance, identity, and care, and shows how sonic memories can offer vital tools for survival and collective growth.

El Viaje by Lolo & Sosaku

In this playlist, Lolo & Sosaku reflect on the contradictory sensations of travel—how movement can both repel and seduce, exhausting the body while awakening the senses. Although we increasingly hate traveling, there’s always something pleasurable about it—something that forces you to give in to the speed, to the engine’s impulse that displaces you from your center. It’s also curious that we usually begin our trips very tired or almost without sleep… that makes some senses (like sight, in our case) almost shut down, while others, like hearing, become fully alert—especially during train rides.

Quan els gossos lladren, alguna cosa senten by Alba Rihe

With her proposal, Alba Rihe reflects on language as body, vibration, and gesture. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Alba Rihe understands language as living flesh, as a vital practice that transforms us, but also as a limit. All that cannot be said seeks an outlet in the body, in the voice, in trembling. The playlist explores language as a device that inaugurates and fails, that opens spaces for gesture and silence. The written word does not rule: the voice mutates, the body speaks, and language becomes a living actor that reinvents itself with each utterance.

Sonic Worlds of Kids and Teens by Laura Llaneli

This playlist gathers the sonic explorations of children and teenagers who have participated in the Sons de Barcelona workshops for over a decade. They became sound explorers and art creators, expanding their listening and collaborating with one another in everything they did. There is also something beautiful in the fact that the recordings are not perfect: some are saturated, you can hear the click of the recorder, or unexpected sounds that accidentally enter the take. What remains is the trace of a beginner’s hand, a certain amateur quality that makes these sounds even more authentic and precious.

Sons de la natura ibèrica by Eloïsa Matheu

Eloïsa Matheu invites us to listen to nature as a living organism that communicates through sound. This playlist gathers recordings from various Iberian environments, where animals and plants emit vibrations that reveal biodiversity and the health of ecosystems. Attentive listening becomes a tool for deep connection with the natural world, moving us away from an anthropocentric gaze. The recordings do not hide human noise but recognize it as an inevitable part of today’s landscape. The project reclaims the value of sound as an ecological indicator and as living heritage that must be preserved.

manifestació by Roc Parés

Starting from the definition of “manifestation” as a collective expression, Roc Parés proposes a playlist that documents moments of tension, resistance, and public presence. It is a sonic call that reflects the desire for change and the strength of community. The selected sounds evoke the political and emotional dimensions of demonstrations, turning sound into a tool for advocacy and collective memory.

¿Qué significa perder una lucha? by Arnau Sala Saez

In a time when everything feels unstable and fragile, listening becomes a way to sense how social struggles transform rather than resolve. The apparent opposites of victory and defeat dissolve through sound, revealing fragility not as weakness but as the condition for change—an ever-moving process of renewal, tension, and interdependence.