A lone hand raises a Zoom H4n audio recorder, its capsule capped with a fluffy windscreen. Overhead, the pink chōchin lantern of a Shibuya yakiniku restaurant casts its glow. When this image flickered across my feed, I briefly wondered what sound the lantern might emit, but that thought was quickly displaced by another: who would devote themselves to such an act, and what were they aiming to capture? A few more swipes revealed a series of scenes: the same recorder lifted towards glowing kanban signage, humming vending machines, and the layered façades of zakkyo buildings.

I admire the work of field recordists—artists and researchers who venture out with microphones to document the ambient sounds of specific places, from the broad wash of city noise to the subtlest shift of wind. While casual audio recording is not uncommon, deliberate, high-fidelity capture in dense city environments, using gear selected for precision over subtlety, remains unusual. The decision to pause and raise a recorder instead of a camera feels, to me, like a distinct kind of sensitivity to the world.

The field recordist contends with curious glances and wariness. Microphones, especially those with large windscreens, remain unfamiliar in shared public space, and because their subject is invisible, it’s often unclear what, or who, is being recorded. Furthermore, to capture a single, meaningful audio snapshot, the recordist often has to stand perfectly still, holding the device in position for long stretches to avoid handling noise. Yet the attention drawn on the street rarely carries over when the work is shared; field recording remains a niche pursuit, with most appreciation found in small artistic circles or behind the scenes of commercial projects.

Following the trail of the Zoom H4n and the pink chōchin, I was intrigued to find its creator, Tiziana Alocci, using her sound recordings as raw material for computationally generated visuals that have been drawing attention and enchanting audiences. In one work, an abstract globe of luminous, swirling lines fills a rooftop billboard. In another, a finely detailed circular print radiates sharp, hairline spikes from its centre, like the visualised vibration of a struck drum.

Originally from Genoa, Italy, Tiziana now works from her studio in London, where she returns with sound recordings collected on her travels, Tokyo, Bangkok, Berlin, and New York City among them. After each trip, she begins the work of transformation: a process that blends computational analysis, playful experimentation, and interpretive design to produce visual compositions shaped by the recordings’ frequency, amplitude, and temporal form. The resultant images are not arbitrary—they emerge directly from the sonic data she has gathered from the city.

It’s an overcast Monday morning in East London, and I’m waiting between the unloading bays of an early 20th-century industrial block. I’ve come to Tiziana’s studio to better understand her process and to speak with her about Tokyo, sound, and mapping cities through sensory experience. She welcomes me and leads the way up to her second-floor studio. Inside, I spot the Zoom H4n perched on a stand, a familiar detail from the images that first caught my attention, and share the story of how I came across her work.

The photographs of the Zoom raised towards pieces of Tokyo street furniture, she tells me, serve as a kind of visual shorthand for the act of field recording. Though her final output is visual, the process behind it still requires constant explanation. In reality, for these particular sounds, she connected a telephone pickup coil—a small, highly sensitive induction microphone—to the Zoom. Unlike conventional mics, it detects electromagnetic signals rather than airborne sound. It looks like a stethoscope, which Tiziana presses against vending machines and kanban, as if listening for their electronic heartbeats.

“The pulse of the city” is an oft-seen phrase when describing the atmosphere of a metropolis, but in Tokyo, where electronic lighting, signage, and machinery saturate the streets, it can be taken almost literally. The pulse here flows through a landscape of devices that rarely, if ever, power down. Tiziana notes that these recordings are difficult to work with: each machine emits a near-constant, high-frequency tone, almost identical, with only the subtlest distinctions between them. To me, this seems apt. While some cities might be imagined as pounding or thumping, I think of Tokyo’s rhythm as a pristine vibration—so regular and precise it feels unwavering.

When fed into the visual programming software TouchDesigner, these narrow-band signals generate a stable, repeating pattern. Through a circular mapping technique, the frequency spectrum is wrapped 360 degrees so that its start and end points meet, forming a hollow at the centre where low frequencies fall away. The result is a perfectly symmetrical ring. From this starting point, the artist then incorporates her own perceptions into the visual output of the audio data. 

Tiziana’s background in data visualisation ranges from projects with clear practical applications to those that are intensely creative. At its most utilitarian, the discipline is about rendering data visible, the bar chart being its most basic form. But as datasets grow more unconventional and designers engage them with greater imagination, the practice expands into richer visual languages. In Tiziana’s case, this means intricate charts and maps that hover between analysis and expression. With her sound recordings, that functional grounding begins to dissolve, shedding the skin of information design and stepping into the freer territory of data artistry, where the data isn’t merely interpreted, but becomes the artwork itself.

In 2024, an exhibition during Frieze London brought together a series of Tiziana’s Tokyo-centred works under the title Tokyo Love Story: A Sensory Journey Through the Acoustic Vibration of the Lights of Tokyo. She layered each visualised audio recording with her impressions and memories, subtly transforming symmetrical base forms through calibrated shifts in colour, motion, and particle animation. The most immediately readable of the set, Love Merci, is a near-sensual animation drawn from the electromagnetic pulse of an Akihabara adult store’s LED dot matrix sign. It hints at how much activity resides behind the visible—both in the circuitry of the display and in the perceptions it shapes.

I’ve yet to ask a single question from my pre-prepared list, but I take the opportunity to raise Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s 1972 book, which I’d planned to bring up. Tiziana had cited it as a reference for her Maps of Paintings project with London’s National Gallery, where she visualised the gallery’s collection to surface unnoticed patterns and relationships. She confirms that the book’s core ideas run through her broader practice, beyond that single commission.

Berger argues, in essence, that seeing is never neutral. What we notice and how we interpret it are shaped by many forces—whether in artworks or advertisements—including the ideas they contain and the social, historical, and economic contexts surrounding them. He aimed to make those hidden influences visible, so that an image can be understood more completely and with greater depth. It’s a touchstone I return to often, one I adapt to the urban realm in my writing for Tokyothèque.

Tiziana, in turn, carries Ways of Seeing into the sensory realm, shifting the focus from the politics of looking to the politics of sensing. Where Berger juxtaposed text and image, she translates phenomena that exist but are usually imperceptible—inaudible sonic patterns, ambient traces—into visual form, making hidden layers visible and opening them to interpretation.

By mid-morning, the studio is filled with flat, even light. The room’s broad, steel-framed windows, installed initially to maximise daylight and airflow for factory work, now illuminate the space for data artistry, a century on. I’d arrived intending to focus on Tokyo, but as we look out over East London’s skyline of industrial remnants, new-build flats, and cranes in every direction, the conversation shifts to the scene outside. Neither of us is a purist when it comes to urban change, but we share a sense of unease at London’s sweeping erasure of its everyday heritage. 

Since part of Tiziana’s work involves mapping urban transformation over time, I ask what the city’s development might sound like if rendered as an audio timeline. I’d imagined a crescendo from some quieter past to a noisier now, but she proposes something different: a swell in the 1980s, when deregulation and major infrastructure projects brought a chorus of piling rigs and demolition crews. The 21st century, then, would follow with a sustained drone—less dramatic in its surges, but unrelenting nonetheless. It is a pressure rooted in policy, advancing more insidiously.

In statutory terms, London provides broader protections for older buildings than Tokyo, whose approach is often criticised from abroad for allowing the unchecked replacement of its historic fabric. In the British capital, once a structure is listed or falls within a conservation area, demolition or significant alteration becomes difficult without formal consent. The hurdle lies in achieving that status: eligibility hinges on strict architectural or historic criteria, with public sentiment insufficient on its own. As a result, while London’s historic cores are relatively well safeguarded, unlisted heritage in its outer districts remains exposed, and redevelopment is typically incentivised. This city is no more sentimental than Tokyo in many ways.

The discussion of preservation and urban change leads naturally to Tiziana’s most recent journey to Bangkok, which she speaks of with an enthusiasm I recognise. For artists whose practice depends on travel, the latest trip often retains a certain glow. This time, her fascination was with the city’s many abandoned buildings—crumbling shells beside rising glass towers. Some stand paused mid-speculation; others sit untouched for years, trapped in ownership disputes or stalled by legal and economic deadlock. In one such warehouse, she intends to capture its creaks, clatters, and the slow drip of water, using a rainfall sensor to register each droplet’s impact. To me, it reads as a form of urban archaeology, tracing the residues of life and decline in a structure suspended between dereliction and renewal.

“Buildings don’t normally get funerals,” Tiziana says, to which I nod. Whenever my research into Tokyo’s neighbourhood history leads to a building that has since been demolished, the trail tends to end abruptly. In this light, Tiziana’s planned documentation of the Bangkok warehouse’s interior state promises a kind of memorial, preserving what might otherwise disappear. It occurs to me that this body of work could also serve as a form of intervention. In London, for example, sensory documentation paired with photographs, drawings, and historical research might lend a preservation case greater emotional and cultural weight, making a building’s significance more tangible to government and local decision-making bodies.

With the idea of influencing the course of London’s historic fabric unexpectedly on the table, the conversation settles into a pause. It feels like the right place to end. I take a photograph of Tiziana in her workspace, framed by the tools and ephemera of her practice, before preparing to leave. As I do, we agree on a small collaboration: she will take audio from my videography and feed it through her process, rendering the sounds as audio reactive animations. The results, shared on both her and Tokyothèque’s Instagram, form a miniature series on Tokyo’s neighbourhood sounds: the cry of a crow, the chime of a railway crossing, the soft ratcheting of a freewheeling mamachari. Together, they invite us to look beyond the image, into the mathematical and poetic forms of each scene.

It’s a reminder, as her work has been throughout our conversation, that the city is built from more than what meets the eye or ear. Its texture lies as much in concealed currents, unseen patterns, and ephemeral details as in visible landmarks. Just as Tiziana’s electromagnetic rings illuminate the hidden architecture of Tokyo’s lights, our cities carry strata of information and meaning that most will never pause to sense—unless someone finds a way to show us.

Until we meet in the acoustic field,

AJ

Links

Tokyothèque x Tiziana on Instagram
Tiziana's Instagram
Tiziana’s Website

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