Cairo / Lisbon
Noor El-Sayed
Sound cartographer
“Static is not the absence of a signal. Often it is the signal.”
Noor El-Sayed walks cities with two microphones and a notebook that has more crossings-out than streets. She calls the results maps, though they would be useless to a courier.
Her fieldwork has taken in markets, night ferries, and the corridor outside a maternity ward where nobody was performing. She is suspicious of any recording in which a place becomes polite.
The episode is about what she leaves off the page, and why a clean line is usually a kind of lie.
On the show
All guests-
04
A Map Made of Static
Noor El-Sayed charts cities by the grain of their air, and leaves her own footprint off the page.
Noor El-SayedSound cartographer
Maps / Field
47 min