A Counting is an ongoing series of video and sound based voice portraits of US cities. Created in response to the U.S. Census which has historically undercounted marginalized communities, A Counting serves as a meditation on the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the United States and speculation on what a united society would sound like.

Each city edition is created by crowdsourcing phone recordings of locals, counting to 100 in their languages, and remixing them into counts of 100 with a different voice and language for every number. As a “language acknowledgment” one is always spoken in a language indigenous to the land of each city if available.

We don’t have recordings for some numbers, especially in rare and endangered languages. So we’ve included them as silences to hold space for them. We’ve also weighted the probability of these languages, so they will be heard more frequently.

We're hoping to expand the series to other cities and looking to partner with cultural institutions and community groups including museums, galleries, libraries, schools, places of worship and indigenious groups. So if you want to hear your community email us at hello@a-counting.us.

A Counting is the first project of Ekene Ijeoma and his lab Poetic Justice at MIT Media Lab. It was produced by members of his lab including Justin Blinder, Toby Holtzman, Dwayne Jones, Nina Lutz, and David Jiménez Moreno.