5.2 Soundwalks

In the next activity, you will be asked to conduct a soundwalk and make some notes on the sounds you hear. You will travel to a nearby place of your choosing and then either walk, stand or sit for four minutes while listening and recording. The place you choose may feature remarkable or unusual sounds or everyday ones: this is up to you.

To prepare for this, begin to think through some of the sounds that you would like to document in the activity. Write down a few notes on the following in the text box below:

• an idea for a place near you to document
• what you hope to document and what time of day would be best for this
• whether you will stay in one place or walk around while listening
• how you will document the place. You should bring some sort of recording device (a smartphone is fine) to record the soundwalk while you listen to the environment yourself. Afterwards, you will need to write up what you heard, and the recording will be a helpful reminder.

Try to plan your soundwalk such that it has potential to reveal something about the social life or acoustic community in the location you will be documenting. You should also keep some basic research ethics in mind. You should avoid deliberately trying to capture people’s voices or words – especially such that they could be recognised by a listener. You should also be open and truthful about what you are doing and why (e.g. when asked by a passer-by). You might want to focus on sounds that invite questions such as the following.

• What do the keynotes, signals or soundmarks you hear tell you about the sonic and human environment?
• Do the sounds you hear acknowledge or perhaps mark out social and spatial boundaries?
• Do the sounds you hear announce or acknowledge a particular time of the day, week, month or year?
• Do the sounds convey anything socially or culturally distinctive about the community you are in, or allow insights into particular institutions?

Review the plans you made in Activity 10, thinking particularly about the logistics and practicalities involved. Travel to a nearby public space of your choosing and then either walk, stand or sit for four minutes while listening and recording. The place you choose may feature remarkable or unusual sounds or everyday ones: this is up to you. Any kind of recording device will do for this activity, including a smartphone: the key things is to make a record of what you hear.

After you have gone on the soundwalk, return to your place of study and make notes of what you heard, drawing on your recording as a reminder. Identify keynotes, signals and soundmarks (as acknowledged earlier, categories that have some degree of overlap) and make notes about any other kinds of interesting sounds. You may wish to identify how the sounds were created (human, natural, mechanical etc.) and whether you consider them representative or not of the local area.

Write a summary of around 200 words in the text box below. The post should include:

• where and when (i.e. which day of the week, which time of the year) your soundwalk took place
• discussion of one or two significant elements of the soundscape you noted
• an attempt to interpret at least one of these elements, using concepts introduced in this section. For example, drawing on Truax, you might consider how a sound helps to delimit an acoustic community spatially, how it articulates certain points within temporal cycles, or how it affirms aspects of a culture or particular social institutions.

Keep in mind that in the course of this activity you will produce far more information than you can put into a summary of 200 words. This is true of almost any such work. One of the goals of the activity is thus to identify one or two significant points of discussion within a much larger body of data.