Soundwalking in the City: a socio-spatio-temporal sound practice

The spatial-temporal pedestrian practice of soundwaking in its classic form involves a group focusing onlistening whilst being lead in silence through an everyday environment, a model developed by the WorldSoundscape Project in the early 1970s, under the rubric of acoustic ecology. Today the discipline of soundwalking inhabits artistic/ music composition territory, and as such engenders themes of participation, socialcontext, aesthetic listening, environmental sensitization, interpretation, pedagogy, awareness raising, psychogeographic musings and even catharsis. In addition, it is being employed more and more as an active formof social science fieldwork: a method of in-situ soundscape surveying/ data gathering. On occasion there is a purposeful ambiguity in its motivation, leading to a catalytic convergence of arts and science, resulting ininterplay between the study of tacit behavior and complicity in the transformation of said behavior. This complexis manifest when participants are invited to verbalize their experience at the summative discussion, at the end of a walk when the silence is broken. This paper reflects on the author’s soundwalking strategies and feedback from participants’ experiences.