In Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, he describes travelling in a Land Cruiser across the Australian outback with an Aboriginal elder. The man was singing a traditional song of the land, but the cadence of his song altered with the speed of the vehicle, as if he were singing the country in real time, at walking pace. The melodic contour of the song described the lie of the land directly. The terrain and the melody were the same thing, just at different speeds. Like a record being played faster.

The other day, I was on the train between Lewes and Falmer, two small towns in the South of England, travelling over a stretch of the hills called the South Downs that I love very much; Kipling's "blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs", and I found myself wondering what it would sound like to drag a needle over the top of them. A vinyl record stores sound as physical texture: tiny undulations in a groove that a needle reads as it passes over. The hills out the window weren't so different. What's the noise the land makes before language can describe it? Before you can sing songs about it? Does it even have one?

This is a tool for playing terrain. Just the raw shape of the earth's surface converted to sound.

How to use

Click the map to select a point. Choose a sampling method: trace a spiral like a record, scan in lines like a television, follow the path water would take downhill, or draw your own route. The sampler extracts elevation data along your path and converts it to audio. Preview clips in the bank, download them as .wav files, or drag them to the sequencer to layer up the sounds of your favourite stretch of hills.