Negative Research: Sonic Methods in Geography and Their Limits

Abstract

Sound has received much attention from human geographers in recent years. This article opens a debate around the growing body of work on sound as a research method. Sonic methods have largely emerged as part of the so-called affective turn in geography, as efforts to attend to the performative, emotional, and prereflective aspects of experience. Drawing on the work of Adorno, I develop a critique of existing sonic methods, arguing that their focus on affect and immediate experience is unable to grasp “negative geographies”: what and who fails to appear and remains silent to the researcher. These claims are grounded in two autoethnographic accounts of my own experiments with sonic methods. The first is a geographic information systems study of noise-monitoring data in King County, Washington. The second is a participatory mapping project that sought to record and collect “sound diaries” from migrants and refugees across the greater Seattle area. In both cases, I show how silences and failures in the research process make sonic methods useful tools for social critique. Key Words: Adorno, method, negativity, Seattle, sound.