Even the most untenable of pedants can enjoy the occasional widely-publicized tourist attraction, as long as they drain all the fun out of it by turning it into an analytical exercise. I did just that on a recent long weekend in Seville, Spain, when I wandered away from my group and took myself on a soundwalk in the city’s old town.

A soundwalk, as I’m understanding it here, is a method of moving through a space with particular attention to its environmental sounds. Sound artist and scholar Hildegard Westerkamp describes it as “an intense introduction into the experience of uncompromised listening,” the focus of which is “to rediscover and reactivate our sense of hearing” (2001). It is, for Westerkamp, an intervention into our increasingly insular listening spheres, taking podcasts out of ears and bodies out of single-occupant vehicles to learn about the world around us in ways that exceed, or at least supplement, our visual knowledge of it.

I conceptualize the soundwalk as something that can expand beyond walking; not everyone can easily move through the same spaces in the same ways. There is much to be said for a soundsit, in my opinion. The keys to such “uncompromised listening” are not that we walk but 1. that we try to pare down the layers of mediation between ourselves and our sonic environs to facilitate as direct a connection as possible between body and space and 2. that we focus on what we are experiencing from the metaphorical (though often also literal) ground up. “The act of walking,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (1984, 97). Expanding on this, any practice of being and moving (walking or otherwise) in space (urban or otherwise) produces spatially-grounded knowledge, the sound-oriented practices Westerkamp theorizes among them.

If a soundwalk is a bottom-up practice, widely-publicized tourist attractions tend to be much more top-down. Each one projects some idea of a place’s identity which is then interpreted in countless ways by countless spectators, each one directed by their own knowledge and the framing of whatever spectacle they witness. Within the tourism framework, place is performance; whoever controls the staging controls the messaging–in theory. What actually happens in any given public setting varies constantly and can articulate very different understandings of a space.

My most recent soundwalk took place amid the Conjunto Monumental, the group of Sevillian tourist hotspots including the Catedral de Sevilla, the Alcázar, and the Archivo de Indias. These are bound together in a single UNESCO World Heritage listing for their proximity to one another and their combined representation of “the Spanish ‘Golden Age,’” as UNESCO describes it, though it is vague about what time period such an age encompasses. Architecturally impressive and historically significant, this complex is a perennial visual favorite for visitors.

With Zoom H1N recorder in hand, I walked it.

As I listen back to the recording weeks after making it, I remember things: the water 20 seconds in is from the fountains in the gardens outside the Archivo; the megaphone-amplified speech around the 7 minute mark was from a preacher on the steps surrounding the Catedral; the contrasts between high and low levels of background chatter corresponded to moments in which I stepped onto side streets just to get out of the way of some of the heavier crowds; the horses, like me, walked on stone streets.

It’s not that this recording and these sounds are terribly remarkable. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about soundwalks is that they ask you to concentrate on the mundane, to defamiliarize the everyday by underscoring the specifics of any given moment. Water, birds, dogs, motors, trams, horse hooves, crowds, and music are expected parts of wandering the Conjunto. But the exact combinations, the words, the tones, the echoes, and the changes in density and proximity of sounds over the course of 12 minutes are contingent on countless factors, some internal to the listener, many more external. What Seville’s most iconic tourist attractions present visually is only one dimension. The sounds give us endlessly more semantic layers.

References
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2001 (1974). “Soundwalking.” https://hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writings-by/?post_id=13&title=soundwalking.

About the Author’s Biases
Adriane spent a not-insignificant amount on this field recorder, and by gum, she’s going to get her money’s worth.