earthsounds.xyz is a browser-based musical instrument that turns walking routes, and the panoramas visible along them into sound. A user chooses any place on Earth and traces a route they have walked, remember, or might one day follow. The path is sampled at equal distances, so distance across the ground becomes musical time: elevation shapes pitch and rhythm, slope controls intensity, and terrain can form the waveform through which the notes are heard. Street-level skylines can also become polyphonic scores, with built forms, trees and depth unfolding as separate musical voices.

Walking functions as both subject and compositional gesture. A commute, pilgrimage, childhood street, favourite footpath or imagined route can become a repeatable musical reading of place. Created routes can be edited, layered in an embedded sequencer and exported as MIDI or audio, allowing walkers and musicians to build compositions from their personal geographies.

Earthsounds began while travelling between Lewes and Falmer, looking across the South Downs and wondering what it would sound like to drag a needle over the hills as though the landscape were a record. It extends that question to anywhere a person can walk, remember walking or imagine a path.