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Wedding cassettes from the top of the World Trade Center, tourists' video e-mails from the 110th floor, sounds of wind blowing through the elevator shafts, piano music at Windows of the World, corporate conference calls and voicemails from the last day of the buildings' existence.
These recordings are among the artifacts assembled in The Sonic Memorial Project, a cross-media documentary of first-person accounts chronicling the life and history of the World Trade Center and its neighborhood before, during and after Sept. 11.
The project is a collaboration among the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR's Lost & Found Sound, WNYC, the Smithsonian Institution, Picture Projects, dotsperinch, the September 11 Digital Archive and independent radio producers across the nation.
The project began in October 2001 when NPR's Lost & Found Sound opened a phone line for listeners to call in with personal stories and audio artifacts. NPR's All Things Considered aired these segments throughout the year.
"This really turned into a collective gathering place for people to tell their stories," said Nikki Silva, producer of NPR's Lost and Found Sound. "I think that telling stories is an important part of the healing process."
Beginning Wednesday, users will be able to search a database of stories and sounds from the site, which is part interactive sound sculpture and part dynamic audio archive.
Anyone can contribute their personal stories and audio artifacts.
Visitors to the Smithsonian's Sept. 11: Bearing Witness to History exhibit will be able to listen and contribute to these archives in on-site audio booths.
Users can listen to samples from the archive, from the Mohawk ironworkers who built the World Trade Center to the "building stewardesses" who helped to promote the original construction site.
"This isn't the first major change (that's taken place in New York)," Silva said. "There's layer upon layer of histories and cultures that have been created there and died there. By looking back, it gives us a sense of perspective; it gives context to our grief, to our loss."
"The World Trade Center is a microcosm of American life," Silva continued. "It's important to put it in a larger context than 9/11."
Initially, the project focused largely on retrieving some of the voicemail messages lost on Sept. 11.
Verizon Communications issued free cassette recordings to subscribers who wanted to retrieve and save voicemail messages left for them by loved ones shortly after the terrorist attacks.
In addition to preserving these ephemeral messages, researchers wanted to document personal histories immediately after the attacks, since physical archives that were housed in the World Trade Center were lost when the buildings fell.
"There was an impulse to collect that immediately ... to get people to see the value of their own historical artifacts because things disappear so quickly," said Sue Johnson, co-founder of new media documentary firm Picture Projects.
The project has since evolved to amass personal relics such as music, poetry and digital recordings.
"For us, this was one of the first projects purely focusing on audio," said Alison Cornyn, co-founder of Picture Projects.
Picture Projects created a Sonic Browser interface, where users will encounter ambient sounds from hip-hop dance music to stories about the pianist at The Greatest Bar in the World. Visitors will be able to tune in to specific sounds by rolling the cursor over the screen and across a "sound center" that will lower the volume and let other sounds emerge.
The Sonic Browser is "a meditative space that people can use to experience the stories in a very immersive way," Johnson said.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting decided to fund the project because of its unique use of interactive media.
"It looked to us like an original and moving approach to memorializing 9/11," said Louis Barbash, project development officer for CPB's New Media Fund. "It's much more than a database. It allows the viewer to personalize their experience.
"We see this as coverage of 9/11. We don't see this simply as an effort of preservation."
Project directors hope that the online archives will be accessible for generations to come.
"One of our goals is to make this available to historians five, 10, 20 years down the road," Johnson said.
