The soundwalk, defined in 1974 by composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp as “any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment,” has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the last two decades in the fields of sound studies, urban planning, and experimental music.[1] Usually credited to R. Murray Schafer, who along with Westerkamp and other colleagues at Simon Fraser University in 1970 formed the World Soundscape Project and in turn gave rise to the field of acoustic ecology, soundwalking was initially conceived as an exercise in “ear cleaning.” Its originators devised soundwalking in part to provide an antidote to the perceived impact of noise pollution and the homogenization of urban soundscapes produced by ever-increasing industrialization. Soundwalks have since proliferated worldwide and assumed various forms, ranging from silent walks along planned routes to ambient recordings that qualify as sound art or experimental music. While there remains tremendous potential for soundwalking to contribute to urban planning with an ear towards improving the acoustic design of our built environments, this potential has still not widely caught on. What is catching on, however, is the pedagogical value of soundwalking exercises that engage with the spirit of “ear cleaning” while questioning the implicit biases and inequalities of this spirit in the age of #IdleNoMore, #metoo, and #BLM as movements embedded within the 21^st-century reality of ubiquitous media production and consumption.[2] In this current moment, we need to consider how soundwalking might contribute to the study of film sound.

In soundwalking exercises that we have conducted as university instructors, we ask students to listen to their real-world environment according to principles of film sound editing and mixing, with particular attention to three fronts: the ambience attached to the specific regions that we pass through, points of transition between these regions, and spaces where overlap from differing regions (or sound elements within each region) challenges our expectations for how sound should function in those spaces. Each walk covers a variety of spatial categories: bounded outdoor spaces like public parks and courtyards; transitional spaces like interior lobbies and stairwells; loud commercial spaces like coffee shops; and quiet spaces like library stacks. Along the way, participants are asked to take note of details that relate to sonic properties of the space, e.g., What are the loudest and quietest sounds? Which part of the walk was most self-contained, which was the most open, and which transition between spaces was the most dramatic? Where would you place a microphone if you were asked to obtain an “objective” recording of any of these spaces? If a film were to present these environments, which elements would it foreground or eliminate, and why? At the end of the exercise, we reconvene in the classroom for a larger discussion. And then come the assignments.

Between the two of us, we have asked students to cover a wide variety of tasks. A useful starting point always entails some variation on a soundwalk journal, in which students reflect on their experience while responding to specific prompts given them. A follow-up exercise asks students to make a recording of a soundwalk of their choosing, designing a route in which they capture, in a single take, various key elements that the prompts cite, like transitions from quiet to loud or from contained to open spaces. A more advanced, late-semester assignment involves analyzing a film’s soundtrack as though it were a recorded soundwalk; this assignment requires students to consider the relationships between real-world sound and film sound as a basis for understanding how a given film makes narrative and aesthetic use of acoustic space, and what the theoretical implications of such use might be. Invariably these assignments encourage not only reflection upon how sound technology affects our experience of the world but also description of the experience of listening and recording through the terminology inherent to assigned course materials.

For instance, Westerkamp’s original treatise for soundwalking asks us to open our ears to all the sounds of the environment, break them down into their individual components, trace their sources, and assess their balance like a musical composition. This approach dovetails with one of the textbooks we often use in our courses, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History, whose co-authors advocate for the use of musical vocabulary—tempo, rhythm, timbre, texture, and volume—to describe the components of a film soundtrack and their relationships to one another.[3] While in the classroom we acknowledge the problems of analogizing the media of film and music, musical vocabulary often proves to be useful to students who are new to the study of film sound and who may struggle to describe what they are hearing when they listen to movies: rhythms of film speech, timbres of sound effects and voices, contrapuntal sound textures, and so forth.

Other pathways from the soundwalk to film sound analysis can draw on intersections between film sound theory and acoustic ecology, such as Schafer’s distinctions between “hi-fi” and “lo-fi” soundscapes (sparse and clear vs. dense and muddy), Michel Chion’s related attention to “auditory extension” (across what distance is a sound meant to extend in the film’s diegesis) and “on-the-air sound” (the ways in which technologically transmitted sound can break the rules of spatial propagation), and James Lastra’s distinctions between “telephonic” and “phonographic” modes of sonic representation (emphasis on human speech vs. an attempted fidelity towards the full sonic environment). In turn, the relationships between what students hear on their walks (and in their recordings) and the terminology of acoustic ecology and film sound theory can prompt deeper theoretical discussions. For example, a major thread in sound studies in general, and film sound theory in particular, has been the subject of fidelity and the extent to which recordings can reproduce specific environments. When students are asked on the soundwalk to imagine where they would situate a microphone to capture an objective recording of the environment, they quickly discover in practice that no recording can fully reproduce a physical soundscape. Microphone placement and other factors all but guarantee that recorded sound is not a reproduction but rather a representation of sound. And as Rick Altman posits in one of the first assigned readings in our courses, mediation based on listener position is central to the experience of all sound, recorded or not.[4] As a prelude to these ideas, the soundwalk introduces students to the fundamentally mediated nature of sound.

And here arises a tremendous opportunity to up the stakes for critical inquiry by folding film sound theory back onto acoustic ecology. Why, for example, did Schafer spend so much time lamenting the prevalence of mediated sounds with troubling terms like “schizophonia,” drawing on negative ableist connotations of schizophrenia to describe the noise and disorientations he attributed to technologies of sound transmission? If the state of film sound theory refutes any claims to differentiation between the real and the rendered, perhaps film sound theory has an argument to make against the biases embedded within acoustic ecology’s call for more attentive listening practices?

Indeed, in each of the above-mentioned exercises lies a responsibility to “attune” students to their intersectional positionality.[5] One particularly effective reading in this respect is the opening chapter of Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, which outlines the complex nature of settler orientations and the need for non-Indigenous people to understand the legacy of their own histories of settlement when listening on Indigenous land (i.e., all land). A soundwalk assignment could require students to write about how their own settler positions might affect what they hear and how they hear it, and such a prompt could carry through the course to consider how films orient themselves on questions of race, class, and gender through sound. Related to these questions is the whiteness of the history and practice of soundwalking. As Jennifer Lynn Stoever writes in the introduction to a blog series, “While we often think of soundwalks as engines of knowledge production, we must also consider that they may simultaneously silence divergent worldviews and perspectives of space and place.”[6] One could assign the series as readings for students to complete prior to their soundwalking exercises. Similarly, embedded in the very name “soundwalk” is the presumption of physical abilities of walking and hearing, i.e., the face of ableism present in early acoustic ecology. We must conceive of the soundwalk in broader terms, that is, as a “mobile listening experience” wherein definitions of mobility extend well beyond pedestrianism and definitions of listening include a range of vibrational sensory experiences.[7] Ultimately, the problems raised by soundwalking within an intersectional framework offer a productive way of combining our desire to open our students’ ears to the world, and its artistic shaping in the cinema, with heightened awareness of the politics embedded in all acts of production and consumption. As such, soundwalking in the 21^st century can prove a powerful tool to analyze film sound through the ear of unsettled listening practices.

1. Hildegard Westerkamp, “Soundwalking,” Sound Heritage 3, no. 4 (1974): 18. Helpful accounts of the history and functions of soundwalking include Frauke Behrendt, “Soundwalking,” in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (London: Routledge, 2018), 249-57; John L. Drever, “Soundwalking: Aural Excursions into the Everyday,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 163-192; and Andra McCartney, “Soundwalking: Creative Moving Environmental Sound Narratives,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 2, eds. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyeck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 212–37. ↑

2. Milena Droumeva and David Murphy, “A Pedagogy of Listening: Writing with/in Media Texts,” in Soundwriting Pedagogies, eds. Courtney S. Danforth, Kyle D. Stedman, and Michael J. Faris, https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/soundwriting/droumeva-murphy/index.html, last accessed July 15, 2021. Preliminary notes about a soundwalking assignment are found in Katherine Spring, “Walk This Way: The Pedagogical Value of Soundwalking to the Study of Film Sound,” Music and the Moving Image 5, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 34-42. ↑

3. James Buhler and David Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). ↑

4. Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15-31. This idea is explored in more depth by James Lastra, Steven Wurtzler, Jonathan Sterne, and Philip Auslander, among others whose work is often assigned in our courses. ↑

5. For more on attunement and pedagogies of listening, see Droumeva and Murphy. ↑

6. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Soundwalking While POC,” Sounding Out! blog series, August 26, 2019, https://soundstudiesblog.com/category/soundwalking-while-poc. ↑

7. See Behrendt, 249; John L. Denvers, “‘Primacy of the Ear’—But Whose Ear?: The Case for Auraldiversity in Sonic Arts Practice and Discourse,” Organised Sound 24, no. 1 (2019): 85-95; and Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” Senses and Society 7, no. 1 (2012): 72-86. ↑