Alice Moffett and Shaun Clifford want you to shut up and listen.
Alice Moffett and Shaun Clifford want you to shut up and listen.
They’re the founders of
an app filled with recordings collected from some of the wildest corners of the planet.
Think summer cicadas humming through Kyoto, whales calling off Lady Elliot Island and howler monkeys kicking off in Guatemala.
Every sound is recorded out in the world, exactly where it happened. We caught up with Alice and Shaun to find out what makes a place worth recording, the sounds they’ll never forget and why your ears might be one of the most underrated bits of travel kit you own.
Before Luvia became an app, it was a series of trips. At what point did you realise you were building something bigger than a collection of recordings?
Shaun: The real turning point was Kyoto, Japan. Alice, a friend of our’s Joe, (who is a photographer), and I spent a day recording koto artist Harumi Shimazaki at the Soushunan Cultural Music School, with shakuhachi player Van Eyshow and her daughter Reiko watching between takes.
We recorded the sounds and interviewed these tradition keepers and realised we were capturing a cultural story, and realised we could make a window into a world for people to explore.
Listening back afterwards, we realised we hadn't captured a sound. We’d captured a time, a place, a person and a story. That isn't a collection, it's an archive of living things.
Then one of our field recordings passed three million views on Instagram, and people kept telling us it sounded like home.
That was the moment it stopped being a habit and became something we owed to other people.
Listening to the great outdoors. Literally.
Travel is usually remembered through photos. Why do you think we pay so little attention to sound?
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Alice: Sound is everything around us: it's the part of travel we absorb without noticing, which is exactly why it stays with us.
You can forget what a market looked like, but the atmosphere comes flooding back the moment you hear something similar. We see this all the time with Luvia.
When people hear the birds in our recordings, many instantly think of home: a childhood home, or a forgotten memory.
Sound connects directly with the brain’s emotional and memory centres and it’s why patients even with dementia can access deep memories.
One of our deepest hopes is that someone far from home, a refugee, an expat, a homesick student, can press play and feel held by something true. To truly connect with a place is to slow down enough to be silent and deeply listen. It has turned me on to experience my senses in a profoundly heightened way.
Travel is usually remembered through photos. Why do you think we pay so little attention to sound?
Alice: Sound is everything around us: it's the part of travel we absorb without noticing, which is exactly why it stays with us.
You can forget what a market looked like, but the atmosphere comes flooding back the moment you hear something similar. We see this all the time with Luvia.
When people hear the birds in our recordings, many instantly think of home: a childhood home, or a forgotten memory.
Sound connects directly with the brain’s emotional and memory centres and it’s why patients even with dementia can access deep memories.
One of our deepest hopes is that someone far from home, a refugee, an expat, a homesick student, can press play and feel held by something true. To truly connect with a place is to slow down enough to be silent and deeply listen. It has turned me on to experience my senses in a profoundly heightened way.
Hit Play
Can't you just hear (read: feel) the serenity?
Has creating Luvia fundamentally changed the way you travel?
Shaun: Completely. I used to travel to see things. Now I travel to hear them, which means arriving earlier, staying longer and moving a lot less. I'll happily spend days in one valley if the dawn chorus is right.
I'm up before first light almost everywhere I go, because that first hour is the recording I'm really there for, and I've learned to ask locals a slightly odd question: what does this place sound like? The answers are always better than the guidebook.
Alice and I also travel with a different sense of responsibility now.
We're taking something precious home with us, so we want to give something back, by collaborating with local musicians and cultural custodians, and directing part of Luvia's revenue to conservation and cultural groups in the places we record. It's slower travel but it's also so much richer.
A private concert? We're all ears.
What's the strangest place you've ever set up microphones?
Alice: In the heart of the Ancient Mayan City of Tikal in Guatemala, at dawn. To hear the jungle wake up properly you need to be completely devoted to setting out before dawn (which we love) and to many hours in reverence, so we set off into Tikal before dawn every day for a week, and waited, silently. Damp ancient stone, no light, and fascination for what was moving around in the trees below.
Then the howler monkeys started. If you've never heard them, it's a roar that rolls across the forest like distant thunder and sounds like a roar of a jaguar.
Toucans, woodpeckers and other tropical birds layered in beneath it, and as the light came up the ancient temples appeared one by one above the trees.
It's one of the most extraordinary places we’ve ever witnessed and recorded, and easily one of the most mysterious. After a week of devotion, the ancient city was speaking with us, and we recorded an essence that is more than two thousand years old.
Shhhh. The bush is spilling its secrets.
Alice: In the heart of the Ancient Mayan City of Tikal in Guatemala, at dawn. To hear the jungle wake up properly you need to be completely devoted to setting out before dawn (which we love) and to many hours in reverence, so we set off into Tikal before dawn every day for a week, and waited, silently. Damp ancient stone, no light, and fascination for what was moving around in the trees below.
Then the howler monkeys started. If you've never heard them, it's a roar that rolls across the forest like distant thunder and sounds like a roar of a jaguar.
Toucans, woodpeckers and other tropical birds layered in beneath it, and as the light came up the ancient temples appeared one by one above the trees.
It's one of the most extraordinary places we’ve ever witnessed and recorded, and easily one of the most mysterious. After a week of devotion, the ancient city was speaking with us, and we recorded an essence that is more than two thousand years old.
Shhhh. The bush is spilling its secrets.
Was there a recording that almost didn't happen?
Shaun: Our whale recording at Lady Elliot Island, on the southern Great Barrier Reef. I decided last minute to take my recording gear into the water, and what happened next was incredible. In the distance I could see a mother and baby Humpback whale, appearing to be swimming past. It sounded like the baby was communicating with mum and she was answering back, asking if they could come over and see the human (me). Then all of the sudden the mum and baby turned around and swam right up under me, so incredibly close that I almost had to swim out of the way. But what was insane was the sound.
The depth of the whale call reverberated through my entire body, shaking my bones.
When the song finally came through the headphones, I just sat there stunned and in deep appreciation for this moment of connection.
That recording became the heart of a Sound World in Luvia we call Water Therapy, and every time I hear it, I remember how close we came to missing it.
That's field recording, really. You can plan every detail, but the animals, the weather and the place decide whether you get the take. You're a guest, and you go home with what you're given.
Which soundscape should every get lost reader listen to first, and where do you hope it inspires them to go next?
Alice:
To take a part of the world with them, every get lostreader can listen to Northern Rivers, the sub-tropical rainforest of Australia for free Inside Luvia: Living Soundscapes app.
It’s an entire sound world of hand-recorded sounds from the subtropical rainforest of Australia in the beautiful Byron hinterland and the rivers and oceans of, and around Byron Bay. We love its deep, dreamy effect and we know you will too.
Shaun:
Mayoi Michi. It's shakuhachi and summer cicadas, recorded in Kyoto in 2023,and it's the closest thing we have to a postcard you can hear.
The name roughly means 'the path where you lose your way', which feels made for get lost readers. Put it on with headphones, close your eyes and let the cicadas swell around the flute.
Then go to Kyoto but go early. Before the crowds arrive, find somewhere green, a temple garden, a river path, the bamboo at Arashiyama, and listen for ten minutes before you take a single photo. And if it inspires you to go somewhere else entirely, even better. The whole point of Luvia is that the world sounds extraordinary when you give it your attention. Our recordings are only a doorway. The real thing is out there waiting.
When your Spotify wrapped is 100% bamboo forest noises...
Shaun: Mayoi Michi. It's shakuhachi and summer cicadas, recorded in Kyoto in 2023,and it's the closest thing we have to a postcard you can hear.
The name roughly means 'the path where you lose your way', which feels made for get lost readers. Put it on with headphones, close your eyes and let the cicadas swell around the flute.
Then go to Kyoto but go early. Before the crowds arrive, find somewhere green, a temple garden, a river path, the bamboo at Arashiyama, and listen for ten minutes before you take a single photo. And if it inspires you to go somewhere else entirely, even better. The whole point of Luvia is that the world sounds extraordinary when you give it your attention. Our recordings are only a doorway. The real thing is out there waiting.
When your Spotify wrapped is 100% bamboo forest noises...
Want to hear what all the noise is about?
Download Luvia: Living Soundscapes from the App Store and stick your headphones on.
get in the know The world's loudest animal relative to its size is a tiny shrimp. Pistol shrimp snap their claws so fast they create a collapsing bubble that produces a shock wave, a loud pop and even a brief flash of light.
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