Hearing place: podcast narratives and the sonic geographies of Shangri-La

This paper proposes podcast place-making as a sonic method to examine how tourist destinations are produced in the interaction between institutional design and everyday practices. Using 32 Mandarin-language travel podcasts about Shangri-La, the study analyses how narrative vocals and environmental sounds create spatial meaning beyond the visual. Building on Lew’s (Citation2017) continuum between placemaking and place-making, the analysis specifies the neglected “mixed-middle” where governance plans meet lived routines. A three-part framework of relationality, affectivity, and performativity guides the qualitative content analysis of podcast transcripts and sonic features. Findings show that podcasts function as a narrative infrastructure that forms the interactive middle of place making. Relationality surfaces through route guidance and encounters, affectivity through mood and acoustic texture, and performativity through self-storytelling that folds vulnerability into experience. Together, these dimensions invert Shangri-La’s institutional visual tropes, producing an ordinary, relational geography that is heard rather than seen. The paper contributes to tourism geography by positioning sound as both a method and a medium of place formation, demonstrating how podcasting practices bridge planned and lived geographies.