Atlas of Albanian Sound

Started in 2023, the Atlas of Albanian Sound is an ongoing creative project that maps the entanglements of music, memory, and place during an often overlooked period: early 20th century Albania. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the redrawing of nation-state borders across the Balkans displaced and attempted to erase many communities, particularly Muslim, Roma, and Jewish groups. For Albanian communities, these new borders reconfigured life and mobility in significant ways. Bringing together 78 rpm recordings, discographies, and historical research, this project traces sonic geographies across Albania and its diasporas by uncovering the music and the musicians who carried their stories through sound.

Through collaborations with private collectors in the US and Greece, I am currently digitizing and remastering more than 300 songs originally pressed on shellac discs—from the first known recording of the Albanian language in 1906 to the haunting voice of Hafize Asllani in Leskovik, Labë iso-polyphonies, highland çifteli riffs, the marching-band anthems once performed for King Zog... and everything in between. I am also building a digital database that documents the songs, the musicians, and the communities behind them. The goal is to share these recordings through a freely accessible interactive archive, where sound, place, and history can be explored together.

As a geographer, I am interested in how speaking and listening—or, the oral and the aural—can serve as cartographic method, and how this in turn can reveal connections, displacements, and resonances that remain invisible on conventional maps and archives. Through this work, I've come to understand sound and music as living, collective spaces of memory, and as invitations to reimagine how we chart and navigate our world(s).

What sorts of cartographies emerge from these songs?

Can the map serve as archive?

Can the archive serve as map?

How does past resonate with present?

Sound is the territory. Listening is the atlas.*

This project is a labor of love and has benefited greatly from the generosity of the collectors, folk musicians, elders, and scholars who have shared their knowledge and time with me.

Interactive map archive coming soon.