Social media has become the sharpest double-edged sword of our time. Never in the history of humanity have we had tools of connectivity as powerful as we have now. To be able to speak with and see someone on the opposite end of the world in real-time HD video through direct messaging on any number of platforms is as commonplace a means of communication now as a standard phone call was 20 years ago. But with Facebook’s own deceptive practices now coming to light, it’s crucial to examine these means of connectivity beyond the platforms themselves, but rather to find instances of their use as vehicles of community building both online and IRL.

For the past 4 or so years, I have been the sole admin of the @la_meme_young Instagram page, a meme page dedicated to experimental music and sonic arts pedagogical topics. As I started to hit 5-digit follower counts, I was able to see exactly where in the world folks were interacting with my content. Somehow this once tiny little dump for niche music classroom Powerpoint memes became a community of sonic arts lovers spanning six continents (ahem…Antarctica, what gives?). Whether I like it or not, Instagram is the reason why I know something as specifically niche as what the southern coast of Montenegro sounds like at sunrise, and that’s enough for me to stay online, politicized data mining be damned.

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With such an international platform, I wanted to find a way to document the many sounds of this digital community. For someone such as myself who has built much of my professional practice as both artist and teacher through my internet presence, it’s imperative to find creative ways of deconstructing the platform beyond its intended use to create something we can all participate in, even if the algorithm sees no interest in monetizing off of us, burying us in the feed. Thus, the La Meme Young Found Sound Stories project came to fruition in late May 2021.

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By the beginning of this year, whether intentionally or by accident, folks from all over the world started sending me found sound recordings they had taken in their daily lives or found through their own digital digging. Naturally, I started reposting them to my story highlights, each of which can permanently store 100 fifteen second videos for public display. The first video was uploaded on May 30th in a new “Found Sound” folder, at the time of writing this (October 9th), there are over 1050 submissions spanning 11 folders and all six continents of the LMY community. These found sounds range from live music performed by the user themselves, industrial noises recorded on the job, stray cats causing a ruckus in the alley outside, or simply the weird squeal that an old vacuum cleaner makes as someone tries to clean their living room. While silly and playful on the individual level, what this collection represents as a whole is the usage of something as trivial as Instagram Stories as an incredibly convenient sound mapping tool.

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Sound maps use recorded audio as a means of documenting a marker in time in any specified place, and are often accompanied by a specific visual or graphic interface, whether it be a literal map, an album release, or in this case, a collection of videos posted to Instagram Stories. Composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood defines sound maps in liner notes of her 2008 release Sound Map of the Danubeas “an aural tracing [of a specified place] interleaved with the memories and reflections of its people”.

In the case of my Instagram found sound project, the recorded media is produced directly by the people participating within this internet subculture. The recorded memories and reflections of the individual in their corner of the world becomes part of an ever expanding archive of over a thousand other memories and reflections, each representing a tiny blip on this massive virtual sonic map.

The beauty of this project is that there is virtually no curation: if I receive a sound, I will most likely listen to it for the first time as I add it to the collection. The ethos is to spread the joy experienced when hearing a pleasing sound in one's daily life. It’s always fun to hear what that telephone poll sounds like if you hit it with a stick, or to take a walk by the ocean to capture the gusts and waves, and it should be fun for others to get in on the sonic experience virtually. Who am I to say one sound is more aesthetically pleasing than another, especially a sound recorded in a part of the world I’ve never travelled to? In an ideal community of listeners, the sounds of far distant spaces should intrigue us even more than the person who recorded it. Much like a cookbook, each of these 15 second videos represent a recipe for the soundscape of an individual’s daily life somewhere else in the world. To engage with each of these recipes is to expand our international palette as acoustic ecologists.

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As more of us consider voluntarily de-platforming ourselves from social media as it continues by design to divide and misinform us, accessibility to digital communities elsewhere becomes the key conversation. Wherever we go next, we must be sure anyone and everyone can tag along. The social media platform didn’t create this massive sound archive in particular, we did, the platform was simply the tool we all had access to, regardless of nationality. And there will always be other tools out there, with chat servers such as Discord and Telegram in many ways allowing the internet to return to its communal roots of safe spaces for niche subcultures. It’s possible for us to take a step back from the information overload that is the Explore or Trending page in order to find an actual community buried at the bottom of a monetized algorithm. And when we find each other, we can choose to move and share sounds with each other elsewhere, together.