During the summer of 2026, I took my first trip to Africa, visiting three countries: Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. Before the trip, I kept thinking about one question — how could I best record my experiences along the way? As a fairly bad photographer, I found myself turning to sound recording instead. It was an unexpected choice, but it made me pay far more attention to what I heard in each place, and I discovered how much interesting "noise" usually goes unnoticed.
As a researcher working on Africa-China cultural and media connections, my fieldwork carries a natural emphasis on Chinese presence in Africa. And since I listen from the positionality of a Chinese researcher, I named this project Africa-China Soundmap. Not every recording is about China, though, such as a matatu blasting disco music, or a rooster crowing in Lusaka. These moments still surprised me as someone experiencing Africa for the first time, and I include them hoping to convey embodied, everyday experience.
This is not systematic fieldwork, but a record of accidental encounters with African life. My focus is on the experience itself: what I heard, what I felt, in that moment. Listening back, I still find myself smiling.
All recordings were made in public settings; none of the voices are identifiable, and no individual was recorded as the specific subject of an interview or interaction. If you appear in a recording and would like it removed, please contact mingyixiao@ucsb.edu.
Recordings are grouped by city in the panel on the left. Click any entry (or any pin on the map) to hear the recording, view accompanying photos, and read field notes about the moment it was captured.