Dropping Down Low: Online Soundmaps, Critique, Genealogies, Alternatives

The chapter argues that existing conceptualisations of the research methodology known as soundmapping are attributed with an excessively narrow historical lineage, are definitionally circumscribed and conceptually problematic – issues that are as evidenced by the chapter through citing the methodology’s Wikipedia definition, the discourse generated by creative and academic applications of soundmaps, and journal articles from sound studies, geography and sensory studies.

The proposed novel genealogy for the soundmap encompasses work from acoustic science and public policy, such as noise maps, and acoustic ecology, such as the World Soundscape Project, but extends these to incorporate manifestations from Victorian Science which predate by 50 years what Valerieo Signorelli, in Urban Design and Representation (2017), identifies as the original date for this methodology. This genealogy also addresses visual artworks as contextualising historical exemplars, including two works a century apart - Marinetti’s “parole i liberta” and Christian Marclay’s Surround Sounds.

The unusual strategy of identifying visual material as a soundmap is enabled by the chapter’s redefining of the concept in more expansive terms, to accommodate the “textual and graphic,” the “desterilised” and the “compositional,” each of which is illustrated by analysis of specific practices, several not previously addressed in this context (or indeed in academic writing). This redefinition is presented alongside a critique of the persistent dependence of what is conventionally understood as soundmapping on technologies that rely on a militarised and capitalised spatiality, that ignore the persistent economic inequalities of access and appear indifferent to the politics of data privacy, “souveillance” and surveillance.

Additional inspiration for this chapter derives from reflexive experiences of twelve years of my own creative practice, which is framed in a 750 word introductory section of the chapter, and includes references to academic citations of that creative practice.