Soundmapping as critical cartography: Engaging publics in listening to the environment

Abstract

There is a kind of growing new media practice of capturing and mapping sound and an emergent global community of listeners interested in engaging with sounds of the environment, urban space, habitats and biospheres. Between user-driven Instagramming our everyday audio-visual experiences and professionally curated sound installations, there is an emergent space and a global audience for listening to ‘soundmaps’ of local and global environments. Sometimes interlinked and sometimes disparate, these communities connect to wider communities of practice and (environmental) activism in the context of social media, new media production and participatory cultures. There are also growing research initiatives that take up soundmapping as a way of inquiring into pressing spatial, geo-political and cultural issues primarily in cities and also in the endangered wilds. Interest in sound in a variety of interdisciplinary fields has grown exponentially over the last few decades. This article will externalize and analyse the frames of several emergent communities and their organizing themes as nascent in new media culture, and social networks specifically, as they intersect with phonography, creative soundmaking and ‘citizen science. By pointing out normative logics embedded in the practice of soundmapping, I then work towards a language of critical soundmapping by way of three examples that I suggest function as alternative forms of representation of and communication about sound environments: (1) the curated initiative Cities and Memory, (2) the creative research project London Sound Survey and (3) the climate change project Biosphere Soundscapes.