Gatwick Airport sounds – the memory of airports

Today’s new sound comes from Gatwick Airport in the UK.

We’ve taken as a starting point a fairly simple field recording of an escalator in the arrivals section of the airport, with its repetitive clunking and mechanical whirrings.

Every single sound you hear in the reimagined version is taken from the original field recording, with no additions.

The reimagined piece is built from samples of the field recording, pitched up and down and layered with various effects, including generative synth effects – meaning that the field recording in effect creates its own melodic lines from the internal dynamics of the sound, which we’ve then assembled and layered into this piece.

City version:



Memory version: