Soundwalking the Isles: Mapping Sonic Perspectives of Kinship, Heritage, Place, and Ecology

Soundwalks first emerged in the 1960s as listening events that encouraged participants to engage directly with their auditory environment (Drever 2020). Initially free from technology, this practice has since evolved, incorporating portable media players, smartphones, and geolocative audio to create interactive audio works that can seamlessly blend recorded and environmental sounds. Recent advancements in GPS technology have further transformed soundwalks, enabling dynamic, location-specific soundscapes that can merge virtual and physical environments into personalised, site-responsive experiences. In this paper, I will draw upon my soundwalk Machair to explore the potential of soundwalk and creative sound practices—including spoken word, music, and sound art—to foster culture-led, embodied placemaking in island contexts. I will demonstrate how soundwalks can amplify Indigenous and autochthonous knowledge of the land and its ecologies, showing how such works can foster kinship with place and communities. By focusing on islands as unique cultural and ecological spaces, I argue that soundwalks offer powerful interdisciplinary tools to challenge traditional modes of engagement and interpretation, opening new avenues for exploring place, identity, community, and the natural environment through sound. • Drever, John L. 2020. Listening as Methodological Tool: Sounding Soundwalking Methods. In: Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 599-613. • Lane, Cathy. 2011. Listening for the Past, ‘Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures’, Volume 5 Number 1, pp.114-127