Headphones On: Audio-Enhanced Soundwalks for Teaching and Analysis

In recent years, soundwalk development and consumption, as well as research on soundwalking, have gained significant traction. A multitude of soundwalks are offered by artists and sponsored by arts organizations; a simple Google search will reveal a variety of options. Many of these offerings incorporate recorded elements, including narration, sound, and music, to supplement the act of walking. This moves beyond Hildegard Westerkamp’s description of soundwalking as an unmediated “excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment.”1 In fact, by incorporating recording technologies, artists and arts organizations usher soundwalks into the digital realm, both guiding and encouraging further production of audio-enhanced soundwalks—a term I use here to denote soundwalks with curated sonic accompaniments that necessitate using headphones.Scholars have established a small body of literature addressing soundwalking practices and related concerns using short-form scholarship, such as conference papers, articles, and book chapters. Andra McCartney’s soundwalk scholarship deserves particular notice.2 Yet the recent Soundwalking Through Time, Space, and Technologies (2023), edited by soundwalking artist and researcher Jacek Smolicki, suggests that this body of literature has room to grow.3 Near the end of the book, Smolicki asks readers to consider how we can make soundwalking a more critical practice, which echoes earlier calls from scholars.4 This request is significant and substantial, but before one undertakes this work, there is a preliminary consideration: Scholars must more thoroughly analyze specific soundwalks. The “multitude of soundwalks” mentioned earlier, which includes several audio-enhanced soundwalks, has not been rigorously examined. A high quantity of available soundwalks does not equate to a high quality of soundwalks.Moreover, no soundwalk canon currently exists. Soundwalking is too new for a canon; it gained appeal after Westerkamp and R. Murray Schafer emphasized soundwalking as part of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) in the 1970s.5 There are certainly key soundwalking figures, such as Westerkamp, Schafer, and Janet Cardiff, but the field remains open to contributors.6 Thus in this review, I consider five modern contributors, focusing on soundwalks developed in the last five years—many since the COVID-19 pandemic. This mirrors my own involvement in soundwalking practices; I have become increasingly engaged as a soundwalking participant and scholar since 2020. In this review, I also give preference to audio-enhanced soundwalks, highlighting the increasing technological sophistication of modern soundwalking projects and practices. All soundwalks in this review have a strong online presence; one should be able to access them easily, which makes them ideal for individual use as well as classroom instruction and discussion. Hence, this review foregrounds operational and pedagogical critique, centering user accessibility, effectiveness, and educational potential. It provides possible candidates for a core repertoire of soundwalks, and by doing so, provides a step toward more critical discussion.As part of Seattle’s FLOW: Art Along the Ship Canal, Saltwater Soundwalk (2022) provides a fifty-five-minute “audio experience.”7 A person can listen to all fifty-five minutes at once or choose from twelve shorter vignettes, all of which include speaking and environmental sounds.8 When listening, the sounds within the audio recording, not the listener’s surrounding environment, are paramount. This allows the soundwalk to be listened to anywhere at any time; being on site is not crucial to the experience.9 To quote from the soundwalk’s main web page, “Saltwater Soundwalk is about our relationships and responsibilities towards the Salish Sea and connecting waters, centering Indigenous Coast Salish voices and language.”10 On one hand, the soundwalk focuses on how Seattleites connect and interact with local waterways.11 This is apparent in the recorded component’s narrative, but also in the “watery” soundscape composed to accompany the narrative. The creators/producers, Jenny Asarnow and Rachel Lam, traveled to several locations in and around Seattle to record water sounds, subsequently crafting a layered, water-centric soundscape.12 Significantly, these recordings highlight locations in the narrative; water recordings from Gas Works Park, for instance, underscore discussion of Gas Works Park.13 The narrative also highlights human-to-human relationships while giving priority to Indigenous voices, drawing from producer-conducted interviews, recorded responses, and tribal members interviewing each other.14 By positioning Indigenous history and culture as a central feature of Saltwater Soundwalk, Asarnow and Lam help uplift and empower Indigenous peoples.A tricky element of Saltwater Soundwalk is that it describes locations that are both on and off a companion walking path. Seattle’s Gas Works Park, Lake Union, and the shipping canal, for instance, are all on this path (figure 1). Hood Canal, however, is west of the city.15 For a non-Seattleite, especially listening at home, the mix of on- and off-site locations can be confusing. The physical location of the companion path in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood is also significant, which might be overlooked when listening remotely. It has a strong rowing and boating presence.16 Near the walking route, it houses a variety of local and business buildings, including a prominent Adobe research lab.17 And its residential real estate is pricy.18 With a mix of industrial, domestic, leisure, and city buildings, it is clear that Indigenous lands, as well as the people and culture of those lands, have been supplanted. Perhaps the most poignant reminder of this is a photograph my friend, who walked the route with me in May 2024, took of a locked dock (figure 2). The image clearly suggests this is an area of water recreation for the wealthy. In this sense, more seems to be gained by experiencing this walk in person. The visual imagery along the route can enrich the soundwalk.The walking path, though, could be clearer. It is described textually by The Seattle Times and on the soundwalk’s main web page.19 The Seattle Office of Arts on 3A’s website, they are introduced in the context of Schafer’s work with the WSP.23 Walkers/listeners can explore fourteen soundwalks, primarily in park settings. Several walks include spoken audio but others are without words, offering a mix of musical accompaniment with natural sounds. A handful of the soundwalks are complemented by additional resources, including guidebooks, photographs, and videos, and these largely visual accompaniments add welcome depth. Though meant to be experienced in Portland, 3A’s soundwalks provide effective materials for both in-person and online participants.3A’s website is clearly geared toward listeners. Nearly all soundwalks listed there provide the approximate time it takes to complete a given soundwalk, immediately indicating one’s necessary time commitment. With the exception of a single soundwalk, Sonic Blooming, recordings are available through SoundCloud; several soundwalks also have downloadable WAV and MP3 versions walkers can preload onto their phones before walking, increasing audio accessibility.24 Each soundwalk has directions; maps appear on every page and artists often provide a cross street or other landmark for starting the walk. In cases where paths are meant to be decided by the walker, directions are present, but minimal.25The soundwalks vary widely in topic. For example, Yuan-Chen Li’s Sonic Sedimentation “imagines the process of sedimentation for the participants.”26 Darrell Grant’s Come Sunday has walkers move through an area that was once “the heart of Oregon’s largest Black community.”27 Sarah Tiedemann’s Heal the Land, Heal the People centers Indigenous experiences in Cully Park, the largest and most ethnically and racially diverse neighborhood in Portland.28 DB Amorin’s long shadow is meant to pair with the MAX Red Line route from downtown Portland to the Portland International Airport. Its composition during the COVID-19 lockdown was driven by a desire to move, travel, and visit, actions not possible at the time.29 Julie Hammond’s Soil to Sand/Sky to River is unique in that it initially encouraged walkers to “create a single-page graphic score of their Soil to Sand/Sky to River soundwalk experience.”30 Selected scores were promised to be performed by Canadian musicians, though no information indicating that such an event took place exists on the web page.Although these soundwalks were designed for specific purposes in and around Portland, they are poised to have impact outside of their geographic region. For example, Sonic Sedimentation could serve as the basis for a listening activity about musical texture or form, perhaps in a music and environment course. Come Sunday and Heal the Land, Heal the People could spur classroom discussions about soundwalks and underrepresented or marginalized local communities. One could listen to long shadow while riding a different public transit line, perhaps considering the differences in bus or train travel between the pandemic and now. Participants could create graphic scores to accompany Soil to Sand/Sky to River. Individually or as a group, the soundwalks could also be examined as potential models for soundwalk development. Since most of the soundwalks were created between 2020 and 2022, it would be advantageous for 3A to update those pages in 2026, adding more visual or sonic resources and following up on issues such as a still incomplete external website for Sonic Blooming and the graphic scores for Soil to Sand/Sky to River.31 On the whole, though, the 3A soundwalks have the potential to retain significant meaning, and even create new meanings, outside Portland’s city limits.While geography was foundational for developing Saltwater Soundwalk and the 3A soundwalks, Sonia Killmann and Laura Fisher’s collaborative soundwalk GOING OUT|GOING IN (2021) was developed without a specific location in mind.32 It encourages the listener to be more observant about their own city, peppering a mostly subdued musical soundtrack with simple directions and questions for the listener to consider while walking. This particular walk’s design is the most accessible thus far; physically, it can be done anywhere. I have listened to this soundwalk using routes of my own design both in and near my suburban neighborhood and I could easily do it on my university campus.I find balancing volume tricky with audio-enhanced soundwalks, so I appreciated the fact that Fisher focuses on this issue at the outset of her narrative. She encourages listeners to adjust their audio devices’ volume to make sure they can hear the recorded audio alongside the environmental sounds, even offering the possibility of listening with only one earphone. This places the onus of balancing the volume on the listener instead of the artist—an effective shift. Fisher then continues her recording with a breathing exercise, setting a meditative atmosphere. As the walk continues, Fisher returns to the practice of breathing a handful of times, which feels grounding.Over an audio track with ambient synthesizers and other intermittent sounds, Fisher asks several questions. When I could answer questions with a simple “yes” or “no,” or other succinct responses, I felt engaged. The questions, though, often come at a rapid pace that made it difficult to sustain active involvement. This is especially problematic for questions that, by design, invite meaningful reflection. Most often, questions of this type are followed immediately by another question, leaving little or no time to reflect. Over the course of the walk, listeners are also guided to observe various objects and look in several directions. On my walk, I noticed many things I would not have seen otherwise, particularly up in the sky. Yet I found myself craving instructions to listen; the audio seems geared toward focusing on visual and even tactile elements instead of sonic contemplation.The final minutes of GOING OUT|GOING IN diverge greatly from the rest of the audio. Fisher concludes her narration by explaining that music will usher the walker through the end of the walk. I anticipated soft sounds in a slow tempo, akin to the music I had heard previously in the audio track. What followed was a bluesy saxophone solo with percussive accompaniment that increased in volume and rhythmic subdivisions until I could not hear the outside environment.33 The balance felt completely askew—it was the antithesis of the carefully curated volume established in the first minutes of the walk. The concluding music felt designed to “pump you up,” effecting a pronounced shift away from the observation and reflection encouraged for the vast majority of the experience. Yet despite this reservation, this soundwalk has the significant advantage of accessibility in varying locations. It would be a prime pedagogical option if an instructor wanted a number of students to walk and listen to the same audio accompaniment. 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