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GroundedSoma IslesSnackables

🔇 Turning Down the Volume of a City

Cities don't have to sound like stress. In this short film, a professional sound recordist captures the transformed tranquillity of Carrer Consell de Cent in Barcelona — a former road, now a green space — a 15-decibel drop that reshapes not just the soundscape but the entire feel of the ne

Danu Poyner

9 February 2025 · 1 minute

Cities don't have to sound like stress. In this short film, a professional sound recordist captures the transformed tranquillity of Carrer Consell de Cent in Barcelona — a former road, now a green space — a 15-decibel drop that reshapes not just the soundscape but the entire feel of the neighbourhood. The absence of traffic roar is striking, replaced by rustling leaves, distant voices and the kind of quiet that makes you notice things differently.

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Keep reading

Nearby on the shelf.

Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr

Danu Poyner · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac

Danu Poyner · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim

Danu Poyner · 1 min