Chapter 8. Sound in Ethnographic Research
Image: “The empty square, the ancient sound, the sorrowful Erhu cries amidst the turmoil of change Suzhou, China” via flickr, by Dai Luo is licensed under CC BY 2.0
At a glance…
Sound is a vital yet underexplored mode of ethnographic inquiry. Attending to sound aligns with a multimodal approach that expands the sensorium by foregrounding listening as a primary mode of perception, documentation, and interpretation. Sound operates as a force, an index, and an affective field. As ethnographers, we should attend to the cultural, historical, and political dimensions of listening and engage with the materiality of sound to make sense of, and make sense with, sound.
Learning objectives…
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Explain the significance of the sensory turn in anthropology and articulate how sound expands the ethnographic sensorium beyond visual dominance.
- Describe how sound functions as a force, affective field, and indexical trace, and evaluate its material and symbolic dimensions in ethnographic contexts.
- Critically reflect on ambiguity and mishearing as analytically productive in ethnographic practice, particularly in cross-cultural and postcolonial contexts.
- Recognize the methodological challenges and creative potential of using audio recordings, soundwalks, and soundmaps as tools for ethnographic inquiry.
- Apply techniques such as sonic mapping, remixing, and reflective listening to conduct sound-based fieldwork and experiment with auditory ethnographic narratives.
In this chapter…
8.1. Introduction: Sound; field of contact
8.2. The force of sound
8.3. Between sound and hearing
8.4. Constructive ambiguity
8.5. Synesthesia
8.6. Learning activities
8.7. Showcase
8.8. Suggested readings
8.9. Other resources
8.10. Works cited
8.1. Introduction: Sound; field of contact
Ethnographies may gain from a wider focus on senses and their interdependence. Sense data is often eclipsed in the prioritization of sight. As explained elsewhere, visual perception is often equated to knowing, assuming an epistemic authority and sense of empirical precision. The sensory turn is in part a push for ethnographies to move beyond representing world “views”, to exploring different perceptions of the world. Incorporating sound, and analyses of sound, into ethnographic accounts may engage a wider sensory imagination and thereby unseat the exclusive certainty of sight. This is valuable as it leaves the reader and ethnographer in a constructive state of suspension that demands imagination and intellectual flexibility. In order to contend with entrenched analytical and methodological tendencies, it is important that ethnographies call attention to what might be missed in the preoccupation with the visual realm and concern themselves instead with a fuller sensorium.
Recovering rich sensory descriptions in ethnographic accounts can challenge the dry, analytical prose that has “overshadowed”, according to Paul Stoller, the “sensoria of the ethnographic imagination” (1986, 8). Complex engagement with everyday experiences involves listening carefully both to those around you and to the unsuspecting myriad of noises that risk getting “relegated to the background” (Makagon & Neuman 2009). An overload of stimuli can elicit a kind of numbing effect—often considered a characteristic feature of dense urban landscapes. As with all of our senses, we necessarily filter sounds out or relegate them to the back of our minds. Recording, re-listening, re-mixing, and re-creating audio demands a renewed focus on sounds that might initially be otherwise neglected.
Forsey differentiates what he calls “participant listening” from participant observation to elevate the importance of listening for gathering and interpreting ethnographic data. Re-focusing on sound, and incorporating audio into final accounts, he suggests, broadens the scope of potential contributors and pushes to include more voices. Polyvocality is important to the ethnographic process—it helps to develop more faithful cultural accounts and express different dimensions of experience. It also lends a methodological transparency over the process of interpretation and dialogue, as well as the mutual intrusion of the ethnographer and interlocutor. Listening, Forsey writes, “seeks to intrigue and inform.” Different from “explaining”, “intriguing” raises more questions, unravels preconceptions, and subverts certainty.
Audio provides enriched accounts of people and places with dynamics that might exceed or elude written expression. Recorded sounds also “preserve” a sense of “presence” “that places the listener in the scene” (Makagon & Neuman 2009, 12). This calls on the reader/listener to take part in discerning the significance of events, utterances, and things; rather than relying on an authorial guiding analysis, they are tasked with making sense of more immediate data. In this sense, audio encircles the immediate instance.
While written ethnographic representations usually demand a kind of precision and “making sense of,” audio recordings admit more ambiguity and uncertainty. While visual elements require the “condition of being observable from a point in space external to them”(Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 371), sound, as Deleuze and Guattari propose, defies this condition, creating instead a “space/field of contact” (ibid.). This “field of contact”—unlike a field of view that is initiated and controlled by the subject—is affective; the listener has less control over auditory input and this element of risk and vulnerability entails being touched by sounds.
8.2. The force of sound
Symbolic significance is derived from the more fundamental field of indexicality—as the sound reaches and relates to an “other” listener—and indexicality relies in turn on intrinsic material properties and propensities for noises. The pre-symbolic force of sounds—manifest through movement, vibrations, materiality, and effect—come from their form, rather than their content or derived meaning, and thus relay something more direct and amount to “[s]omething larger than the words where they dwell” (Makagon & Neuman 2009, 25).
Though the meaning conveyed in sounds receives lots of focus, as Paul Stoller points out, their actual force and form are often analytically neglected. Stoller argues that it is important to avoid reducing sounds to their perceived meaning or symbolic order since there are often significant elements to sound beyond their intended meanings. Sounds themselves possess an intensity and evoke, in Stoller’s words, a “veritable force of life” (1989, 112). To retrieve a conceptually clear symbolic understanding of a sound generally requires its elevation and concomitant reduction of its ‘excess’ ambiguity and materiality.
Stoller outlines the trend in anthropology to regard intangible objects of perception—“wind, sound, smell”—as objects given their affect on our minds/bodies, an analytic strategy, he contends, that should follow through to the materiality of sound (1989). The materiality of sounds reminds us that we do not only register the symbolic immaterial significance of sounds, we also interpret them indexically and experience their physical, spatial, and dynamic dimensions. Sounds are, as Ingold puts it, neither “mental nor material” but a feature of our immersion in the world. This view reveals more of the process of interpretation, potential—and potentially constructive—ambiguity, and influence of subjective mediation.
What does it mean to appreciate sound as a force? What can ethnographic practice—through multimodal techniques—learn from the fact that “sounds carry forces which are not only good to think, but good to feel” (Ingold 2000, 112)?
8.3. Between sound and hearing
Though we are enveloped in a constant continuum of sounds—many of which we have little control over—our perception of them is not entirely passive and inborn but rather shaped by cultural, historical, and political conditions. If sounds are reflective of social, political, and geographical dimensions of places, the practice and techniques of listening by those who populate them are also culturally relevant. Like any other sense, the practice of listening is subjective; we inevitably omit, filter, distort, and accentuate sounds, limiting our access to the full range of sounds to which we are subject. For this reason, in considering sound we should not, as Ingold warns, “lose touch with sound in just the same way that visual studies have lost touch with light”; both sight and hearing are, he insists, “organs of observation, not instruments of playback”, emphasizing the process of rendering things up to be sensed (2011, 137). The gap between sound and hearing is partially shaped by subjective mediation and individuals’ propensity to omit, dull, or notice different sounds is attuned by the cultural milieu in which they interact. As Brian Larkin (2014) reminds us, Walter Benjamin argued that perception is not just an invariant cognitive process but a historically contingent one. Following Benjamin, we can understand listening as an act of historical and cultural contingency as it is particular to different states of social and material conditioning.
Amid distracting environments saturated with constant sensory overload and populated by agents vying for every individuals’ attention, attention becomes an activity of exclusion to discern where our focus is directed at any given time. This engenders what Larkin calls “techniques for inattention” (2014). These arise from a psychic trait of apathy—the “blasé”— that Georg Simmel (1903) identifies, consequent of an overstimulation of the senses and perpetual micro interactions with strangers. The outlook that results, he suggests, flattens and subsumes differences between things and cultivates a highly rational “intellectual quality” that serves to protect the inner life. This effectively shields affect and emotion from public life, insulating each with a dry unaffected immunity. This serves as a clear instance of a transformation of the senses by sound and physical space, and an unaffected, numb body politic drawing up collective spaces in turn.
Audio recordings necessarily involve re-creating, re-mixing, and curating sounds. Though we may have minimal control over our sound environment, recording audio data for ethnographic accounts inevitably involves interpretive framing, residing between creative practice and documentation. As Eisuke Yanagisawa affirms, for methodological purposes, the recording of sound critically shapes the noise in “particular” ways as it “deconstructs and reconstructs the sounds of reality…transforming them aesthetically, socially, culturally, and economically” (2021, 88). The possibility of recording and curating sounds opens new research questions, avenues, and analytical focus and their presentation draws on certain aesthetic sensibilities. Soundmaps (see Droumeva 2017) are an explicit example of curation and remixing. They are inevitably derivatives of the sound environment from which they are taken, as such they accentuate or quiet certain sounds. They are thus but one possible audible expression of the place. Droumeva emphasizes that attempted objective/neutral documentation—in providing a closer reproduction—can pattern the sound inequalities already existent in a place, positing that creative interpretations can support in locating and amplifying subaltern sounds.
8.4. Constructive ambiguity
The subjective mediation of sound underlines the constant possibility it contains to be misheard or misinterpreted. Taking the force and affect of sounds into account highlights the constructive cultural potential of their ambiguity; the distance between the intended and received meaning of a sound may prove to be culturally and analytically fertile. Take the example of inarticulable sounds: in the absence of a clear meaning they nonetheless exert force that prefigures any symbolic significance but can nonetheless elicit certain responses and are liable to being misheard or misinterpreted. This multiplies their potential meanings and highlights the potential cultural significance of ambiguity.
These potential misunderstandings have important cultural value as they open possibilities for new kinds of exchange and meaning-making (Carter, 2020). In instances where identical translations of terms of reference are not necessarily clear, listening and trying to communicate becomes a form of “cultural production.” By contrast, the prejudice for clear “precise and exhaustive” unequivocal signs and direct translations urge the appropriation and assimilation of sounds most often “in the interest of acquisition” (ibid.). Carter recounts the example of colonial encounters and the development of pidgins which involve “continual linguistic compromises” at moments of linguistic and cultural collision to construct grammars and vocabularies that are intelligible to both speech communities. This learned second grammar represents an in-between, carved out by admissions of each and the incentive for mutual understanding. This demonstrates the communicative potential and cultural relevance of ambiguity as “dialogic mutual misunderstandings” prompt new signs, grammars, and modes of understanding to emerge (ibid.). It also pushes the need to attend to the “inner-speech of history/culture” and the underlying understandings left out of direct translations. The value of this endeavour is not reducible to a “semantic yield,” it highlights the limits of mimicry and communication and “insists” on the truth and value in ambiguity (ibid.)
Mishearing, similarly, is not necessarily an obstacle to communication but also a possible enrichment of it. If ambiguity is culturally relevant and constructive, revealing instances of slippage is both methodologically and analytically valuable. Increased methodological transparency over this process is responsive to the crisis of representation and the critical questions that it raises over authorial authority, reflexivity, and the creative construction of accounts. This encourages ethnography to embrace a wider range of voices into final accounts, admit greater transparency over the dialogic process and creation of accounts, and explore alternate mechanisms for representation.
8.5. Synesthesia
Perception involves the dependence of the senses. Their union is then central to the ways in which we come to learn about, understand, and represent the world. Increased sensory engagement advocates that more attention be devoted to the significance of the interplay between senses, what is emphasized in our perception, what is left out, what is noticed as strange, what we become accustomed to, or what we relegate to the background.
Synesthesia, which describes an atypical sensory experience elicited by the experience of another sense—hearing a sound and experiencing an associated smell for instance—illustrates sensory co-dependence. Though synesthesia is generally considered a neurobiological anomaly, there are more subtle instances in which similar phenomena of the interplay between association, memory, and imagination among the senses are clear. These associations serve as a reminder that no sense operates in an isolated or independent way, that things are perceptible through all senses, and indeed, everything slips beyond the interpretation of any one sense. Instances of synesthesia reveal the ways in which our perception is enveloped involuntarily and how the interplay between our senses forms associations unbeknownst to our immediate awareness. In defying and temporarily dissolving the perceived boundaries between senses, synesthetic effects open perceptual experience to be “steered by other components;” sound, as Deleuze and Guattari propose, often plays a principal role in eliciting “superposed” perception (1980, 346).
Critical observations on the effects of any one faculty—the detriment of supposedly visual-centric organization relative to orality for instance—as Ingold points out, entrenches the individuation and separation of senses. This effectively subscribes to and “reproduc[es] a dichotomy” which, he contends, is itself “deeply embedded within a Western tradition” (2000, 249). Synesthesia, in belying these distinctions, forces our attention to the interplay and dependence between our senses. Our sensory unconscious prompts our imagination, enlivens our perception, anchors memories, and forms our understandings. Closer attention to them may therefore help in grasping and sharing an ethnographic sense of place.
Synesthesia also troubles clear distinctions between mind and body by revealing the ways in which our perception, learning, understanding—generally considered faculties “in the mind”—are anchored in our senses and guided by our unconscious in ways unbeknownst to us. Sensory attention proceeds with the conviction that it is valuable to break down the distance between sensations and intellect, and to permit more embodied engagement to inform ethnographic accounts. Ethnographers may try, as artists do, to draw on synesthetic effects to lend the excess which recedes from written representation and exceeds any possible impression from one sense but emerges instead from the interplay between them.
8.6. Learning activities
Sonic ethnography—soundwalk activity:
Use an audio recording device as you move through, or in and out of, discrete spaces; continue recording as you pass from one location to another. Rather than trying to capture any representative sound of one place, this technique works to disclose more movements through spaces, offering a more dynamic perception.
Link Auditory and Spatial data:
Supplement the audio data with a map and indicate the time of the recording on the location in which you heard it. That way as you play back the recording you can follow along the labeled map and as you look at the map, you can hear different places and intersections.
What does this add to your subsequent reflections about the place; how does the combined resource of the recording and labeled map help you remember or imagine different aspects of the field?
Reflective Writing:
Consider and try to write about the dynamics that the recording lends which are difficult or impossible to grasp entirely in writing. Without trying to explain them, can you describe your observations as they come to you through an open-ended, exploratory prose? What is surprising, ambiguous? What do you feel uncertain or ambivalent about? What do these observational and writing techniques afford to your final account?
In listening to the recording and following the map, can you remember other visual or tactile elements? Describe them.
Juxtaposition:
Juxtapose audio by re-mixing and layering recordings—sounds that are in relatively close proximity—notice how different atmospheres are created by sounds that are otherwise in the same location. Consider the exchanges between and significance of multiple realities unfolding in a shared space. What noises are dominant, filtered, eclipsed (ie. traffic vs the inside of your car vs the inside of a bus/coffee shop, street, commercial kitchen).
From a partner’s layered recording, indicate the sounds you hear in the order that you become aware of them. Then, pick a subversive sound and amplify it. What made you choose it? How does it get drowned out in other noise? What is the significance of amplifying it? How does this shift of sounds fundamentally change the feel or meaning of the place?
Materiality of Sound—Spatial Perception:
What does it mean to see through sound (like a whale!): Translate and transform sound frequencies or decibels into a visual depiction (abstract or otherwise). Take a visual model of sound from a recording (through frequencies) and create a visual model. Through mapping/echolocation, heat, or light/sound frequencies.
Consider what it means to feel the materiality of sound, what does this lend to your perception of a space? Is it claustrophobic, chaotic, insulated, or expansive, open, or echoing?
8.7. Showcase
A Soundscape of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Audio recording
The audio recording is captured by Danielle Cosco, a participant in the University of British Columbia’s Urban Ethnographic Field School, while walking during field research in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in summer 2024.
Presentation and Audience Engagement
During the final project presentations at an event concluding the field school, Danielle Cosco and her group, including Emma Nguyen and Darren Ragoonath, played the audio recording. Prior to the playback, audience members were given origami papers and asked to write down their thoughts inspired by the soundscape. These messages were transformed into origami flowers, contributing to a collaborative art piece titled “Bottle Cap Blossoms: Messages of Hope.”
The Resulting Artwork and Its Description
The group’s description of the collaborative art piece reads:
Inspired by the bottle cap art surrounding the playground in Oppenheimer Park [in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside], this piece is composed of bottle caps found on the grounds of the University of British Columbia and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Nature’s perseverance is reflected through the origami flowers blooming from the bottle cap roots, symbolizing the resilient spirit of the Downtown Eastside. The petals bear messages of hope, each one personally written by the 2024 UEFS [Urban Ethnographic Field School] class, faculty, and friends. Ultimately, this art piece serves as a reminder of the innovation and enduring strength of the Downtown Eastside, the UBC Learning Exchange, and their associated communities.
Danielle Cosco, Darren Ragoonath, Emma Ngyuen, UEFS 2024
Current Display
The art piece is currently displayed at the UBC Learning Exchange, the organization with which the group members partnered during their field research.
8.8. Suggested readings
Stoller, Paul. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.
In ‘The Taste of Ethnographic Things’, Paul Stoller explores the methodological role of senses in his long-term fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger. He documents practices, customs, politics and visions of the Songhay and incorporates sensory depth in each chapter. In contending that tastes, sounds, and smells are often sidelined in favor of more analytical, detached prose, Stoller calls to enliven ethnographic accounts. He advocates for more vivid descriptions of places that explore different dimensions of social life through a wider epistemological sensorium. Broadly the text is concerned with signs, senses, the materiality of sound, subjectivity, spiritual life, language, art, and methodological questions for ethnographic research.
Veit Erlmann. (2004). Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Routledge.
This volume consists of a range of essays on hearing cultural processes. The authors raise a variety of questions around sound, probing the effects to hearing brought about by rapid globalization, audio-technological advances, and urban and industrialized space. The focus on audio highlights different worlds of sound and provides a new perspective with which to explore social issues and cultural encounters. In various ways, each contributing author explores the role of hearing in depicting, understanding, and representing the world around us.
Larkin, Brian. (2008). Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press.
In ‘Signal and Noise’ Larkin provides a close study of media technologies in Nigeria, and specifically the northern city of Kano. Larkin considers the import of new media infrastructure by colonial powers and is concerned with the ways in which sound and technology systems pattern colonial urban projects. He examines the relationship between media and their cultural contexts, documenting the techniques of attention, stimulation, and consumption as they emerge in specific cultural-technological milieux. This text observes the force, materiality, and mediums for communication in their own right, differentiating it from many other emerging studies of media.
Feld, Steven. (2012). Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra. Duke University.
Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld provides a close account of vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. This book is animated by music, narratives, jazz history, and percussion, combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and music history. Feld describes the outlook of his interlocutors through what he calls ‘acoustemology’ (first introduced in his 1992 work) an idiom which foregrounds the role of hearing in coming to understand and reflect on the world to theorize sound as a way of knowing.
Cruikshank, Julie (2005). Do Glaciers listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination. UBC Press.
From UBC: Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which coincided with dramatic social upheaval resulting from European exploration and increased travel and trade among Aboriginal peoples.
European visitors brought with them varying conceptions of nature as sublime, as spiritual, or as a resource for human progress. They saw glaciers as inanimate, subject to empirical investigation and measurement. Aboriginal oral histories, conversely, described glaciers as sentient, animate, and quick to respond to human behaviour. In each case, however, the experiences and ideas surrounding glaciers were incorporated into interpretations of social relations.
Focusing on these contrasting views during the late stages of the Little Ice Age (1550-1900), Cruikshank demonstrates how local knowledge is produced, rather than discovered, through colonial encounters, and how it often conjoins social and biophysical processes. She then traces how the divergent views weave through contemporary debates about cultural meanings as well as current discussions about protected areas, parks, and the new World Heritage site. Readers interested in anthropology and Native and northern studies will find this a fascinating read and a rich addition to circumpolar literature.
8.9. Other resources
- Aaron Collier’s one man play, Frequencies
- Panel discussion on CBC’s Ideas on the relationship between individuals and physics and perception and physical phenomena.
- Radio Lab : Ears don’t lie and Hallucinating Sound
- Steven Feld’s blogsite
- An audio map for Vancouver coffee shops.
8.10. Works cited
- Carter, Paul. 2004. “Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space.” In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 43–63. Oxford: Berg.
- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980.)
- Droumeva, Milena. 2017. “Soundmapping as Critical Cartography: Engaging Publics in Listening to the Environment.” Communication and the Public 2 (4): 335–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317719469.
- Forsey, Martin Gerard. 2010. “Ethnography as Participant Listening.” Ethnography 11 (4): 558–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110372587.
- Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
- Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
- Larkin, Brian. 2014. “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria.” Anthropological Quarterly 87 (4): 989–1015. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0067.
- Makagon, Daniel, and Mark Neumann. 2009. Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226590.
- Simmel, Georg. 1950. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff, 409–424. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1903.)
- Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Yanagisawa, Eisuke. 2021. “Methods and Issues of Sonic Ethnography as a Practical Research Method Based on Field Recordings.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 22 (2): 85–93. https://doi.org/10.14890/jjcanth.86.2_197.
