Kraków has always felt like a city suspended in time. I’ve walked its streets at night, listening to the echoes of the past that seem to linger longer than they should. With MOST, I want to make those echoes speak.
This project then is personal. It’s a mix of everything I’ve worked on – spatial sound, AI-driven storytelling, and immersive experiences. My work at MoMA on procedural narrative building taught me how sound can shape a story in real-time. Augmented Reality projects showed me how we can layer new dimensions over physical space. MOST is where those threads meet—an attempt to turn Kraków into a a sound archive you can walk through.
A Collaboration with the Jewish Culture Festival
Janusz Makuch, the visionary behind the Jewish Culture Festival, asked me to bring this idea to life. We wanted to tell the stories of pre-WW2 Jewish life in Kraków – the literature, the music, the progressive ideas that once flourished here. But instead of a museum exhibit, we’re embedding these stories into the city itself, using location-based audio and AI-driven soundscapes.
The Sound of a City That Remembers
Most means ‘bridge’ in Polish. The name fits: the piece tries to hold the gap between what was lost here and what can still, faintly, be heard. Using AI-driven procedural composition, MOST generates a unique soundscape that adapts in real-time. Walk through Kazimierz, and you’ll hear traces of lost voices, old Yiddish theatre, the hum of a vanished world. It isn't meant as nostalgia; it changes as you move, so no two walks are quite the same.
The Tech Behind the Experience
I’ve worked with binaural audio, object-based sound, and real-time generative systems before, but applying it to an entire city region is something new. The system draws from historical recordings, field sounds, and newly composed elements, reassembling them into an interactive, spatial sound environment. It’s not a soundtrack – it’s a living performance, shaped by movement, weather, and time of day.
A Time Machine
I’ve spent years working on spatial sound and AR. But this is different. This isn’t a gallery installation. It’s not a headset experience. It’s embedded in the real world, in the places where these stories happened. I want people to feel like they’ve stepped inside history not as passive listeners, but as part of something alive. Breathing life back into the spaces once inhabited by a group of people who were erased for their space and time by the terrible events of WW2.
Looking Ahead
Right now, we’re fine-tuning the development of the system. Testing how sound moves through the narrow streets of Kazimierz, the vastness of Rynek Główny, the quiet corners of the city. The first public trial will roll out later this year, leading up to a full launch this June.
Kraków doesn’t need another history lesson. It needs something that feels real, immediate, and impossible to ignore. With MOST, we’re trying to build exactly that.
Andrew Melchior, March 2025.
Kazimierz. The corner of Józefa Street and Bożego Ciała Street, visible tenement house No. 12, author unknown. (1928)