What is Soundwalking?
Soundwalking is a walk with a focus on listening to the environment. A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. The practice directs auditory attention to the full spectrum of ambient sound—traffic, birdsong, mechanical hum, conversation, wind, silence—as the primary object of experience during movement through space. The essential purpose of a soundwalk is to encourage the participant to listen discriminately and moreover, to make a critical judgement about the sounds heard and their contribution to the balance or imbalance of the sonic environment.
Soundwalking operates at the intersection of art, research, and ecological awareness. It may be undertaken solo or in groups, silently or with discussion, with or without recording equipment. The practice assumes that every acoustic environment—urban, rural, wilderness, domestic—warrants sustained listening attention.
Origins & Lineage
The term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project under the leadership of composer R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the 1970s. The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was established as an educational and research group by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It grew out of Schafer’s initial attempt to draw attention to the sonic environment through a course in noise pollution, as well as from his personal distaste for the more raucous aspects of Vancouver’s rapidly changing soundscape. Schafer’s call for the establishment of the WSP was answered by a group of highly motivated young composers, activists and students: Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Howard Broomfield, Peter Huse and Bruce Davis.
Schafer’s 1977 book The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape) incorporates the WSP’s research to explore changes in our sonic environment over history, particularly the increase of noise pollution from industrialisation. Soundwalking was initially conceived as an exercise in “ear cleaning.” The WSP undertook extensive field research, including a detailed study of the immediate locale - the City of Vancouver - published as The Vancouver Soundscape in 1973, and in 1975, Schafer led a larger group on a European tour that included lectures and workshops in several major cities, and a research project that made detailed investigations of the soundscape of five villages, one in each of Sweden, Germany, Italy, France and Scotland.
Hildegard Westerkamp emerged as a central theorist and practitioner. She popularized the creative method/experience of soundwalking, which she defines as “any excursion whose main purpose is to listen to the environment.” Her composition Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) and writings on soundwalking as ecological practice remain foundational texts.
However, this group was not the first to orient themselves to an area by sound and to record the sounds of the environments that they walked through. This article documents some earlier examples of works produced by walking while audio recording. The WSP formalized and named a practice with antecedents in experimental music and urban studies.
How It’s Practiced
In its classic form, soundwalking involves a group focusing on listening whilst being led in silence through an everyday environment, a model developed by the World Soundscape Project in the early 1970s, under the rubric of acoustic ecology. Participants often walk without speaking, heightening awareness of sounds that would ordinarily be filtered out by cognitive habit or conversation.
A soundwalk may be recorded in the form of a map, which the participant uses both to guide the route and draw attention to features of acoustic interest. A soundwalk can be done individually or in a group. It can be recorded or not. It can be re-situated in the same location, or translated into other media forms with little or a great deal of sound processing.
Variations include guided soundwalks led by artists or educators; solo meditative walks; walks with field recording equipment that generate compositional material; and more recent experiments with headphone-mediated walks that layer site-specific audio with environmental sound. This definition is wide, including mobile listening practices where walkers wear headphones to listen to or engage with sound from media devices in addition to listening to their soundscape.
The duration ranges from 15 minutes to several hours. Routes may traverse specific acoustic zones—market streets, parks, industrial districts—or follow urban-to-rural gradients to highlight contrasts in soundscape character.
Soundwalking Today
Today the discipline of soundwalking is being employed more and more as an active form of social science fieldwork within the meeting points between soundscape studies and noise control: a method of in-situ soundscape surveying/ data gathering. Researchers in urban planning, environmental psychology, and applied acoustics use soundwalks to assess community perception of noise pollution and to inform design interventions.
In the arts, soundwalking appears in site-specific performance, electroacoustic composition, and sound art installations. In 2003 Vancouver New Music (VNM) invited her to coordinate and lead public soundwalks as part of its yearly concert season. This in turn inspired the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective, whose members are continuing the work on a regular basis.
Contemporary spiritual and wellness communities have adopted soundwalking as a contemplative practice, often divorced from its acoustic ecology roots. Public soundwalk events appear at festivals, museums, and nature centers. Online platforms host geotagged soundwalk recordings, allowing remote engagement with distant soundscapes.
Today the discipline of soundwalking inhabits artistic/ music composition territory, and as such engenders themes of participation, social context, aesthetic listening, environmental sensitization, interpretation, pedagogy, awareness raising, psychogeographic musings and even catharsis.
Common Misconceptions
Soundwalking is not meditation with ambient sound as background. While silence during a walk is common, the intention is active critical listening, not passive reception or mental quieting. Soundwalking is a practice that wants to bring our existing position-inside-the-soundscape to full consciousness. In that act the walking listener potentially develops a conscious relationship to the environment.
It is not “forest bathing” or nature therapy, though it may overlap. Soundwalking originated in urban environments as a response to industrial noise, and many canonical soundwalks explore traffic, construction, and mechanical soundscapes rather than birdsong or flowing water.
It is not field recording per se, though recording often accompanies soundwalks. The core practice is embodied listening during movement; documentation is secondary.
Soundwalking is not strictly about finding pleasant sounds. Listening in that way can be a painful, exhausting or a rather depressing experience, as our ears are exposed often to too many, too loud or too meaningless sounds. The practice includes confrontation with noise pollution and acoustic imbalance.
How to Begin
Start with a 20-minute solo walk in a familiar environment—your neighborhood, a local park, a downtown street. Leave devices silent. Walk at a slower pace than usual. Notice layers: distant sounds, mid-range activity, sounds of your own body and clothing.
For structured guidance, consult Hildegard Westerkamp’s essay “Soundwalking as Ecological Practice” (2006) or her audio composition Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), which models the form. R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977) provides theoretical foundation.
The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology maintains a network of practitioners and researchers. Local soundwalk collectives exist in Vancouver, Montreal, New York, and other cities, often hosting public walks. University courses in acoustic communication, sound studies, and electroacoustic composition frequently include soundwalking exercises.
Begin by attending to what is already audible. The practice requires no equipment, no teacher, no special location—only willingness to shift attention from sight to sound.