How one musician has used technology to turn 200 Swiss sounds into the wildest music project of the year

This musician engineered a song by mixing together hundreds of sounds in Switzerland in what is probably the wildest music project of the year.

He captured different sounds – both natural and ‘man-made’ – to create a unique song with no vocals, and no instruments.

We had the chance to have a chat with the musician behind this music project.

And there’s one thing he said that completely caught us by surprise.

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This is how this music project was created

Photographer and videographer William Rezé – he goes by Thylacine on YouTube – has been creating music that incorporates organic sounds for a long time.

A while back, representatives of the tourism office of Switzerland got in touch with him and asked him to create a song made up entirely of sounds captured in the country.

No instruments, no vocals – just sounds.

Rezé traveled to (nearly) every canton (different states/regions, basically) in Switzerland to capture different sounds from cities, glaciers, lakes, mountains, and so on.

Switzerland is a small country, but it is rich a country – both literally and metaphorically.

It doesn’t have an ocean, but it has massive lakes and rivers, and it has also chaotic bustling cities as well as quiet villages in the mountains.

It’s an ideal place for a project like this.

Rezé ended up capturing over 200 different sounds, including some man-made ones such as – you’re going to love this – the sound of cheese.

The one thing Rezé did that might surprise you

Some people think this must be a very difficult thing to achieve from a technical standpoint for a musician.

Interestingly, that wasn’t the case.

“Capturing the sounds was [technically] easy because I had all kinds of equipment,” Rezé told Supercar Blondie.

“It was technically easy, but logistically very difficult,” he pointed out.

“On some occasions, I had to hike three hours in the snow to find the perfect cave and when I did, I found different ice blocks that produced different sounds due to air bubbles trapped in them,” he explained.

“I had all the microphones and cameras I needed for that, but getting there was hard”, he said.

And wait until you hear the hardest part.

“The hardest part was when I had to strap myself on to a cable car to capture unique sounds in the mountains,” he explained.

But, as Rezé explained, Switzerland’s tourism office helped massively because, in his own words, ‘they basically said yes to everything’.

“Whatever I told them I needed, they said, ‘yeah no problem’,” he said.

‘Anatomy’ of Switzerland

Number of cantons (states): 26
German-speaking cantons: 17
French-speaking cantons: 4 (French only) + 3 (bilingual)
Italian-speaking cantons: 2
Population: 9 million (the same as Virginia or New Jersey)
Area: 15,940 sq mi (roughly the same as Maryland)
GDP per capita: $111,000 (the same as Mississippi and Arkansas combined)
GDP: $1 trillion (richer than all but six US states)