Steven Connor’s book Giving Way begins with a list of unappreciated qualities, the first of which is a capitalised: ‘SILENCE’. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which ‘tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion’, and some of which are, as Connor notes, ‘characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia’ (Connor 2019: 1). Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of practice and participation. Since 2004, my creative practice has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. This article draws on these works and their documentation to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate together.

This article transposes questions about socially engaged sound practices into a more-than-human register, turning an ear to the sounds of interspecies encounters. It takes its impetus from a workshop aimed at forming a ‘cross-species choir’ by the artist Catherine Clover, in which participants tried to sing like, with and to birds in a London woodland. I describe how Clover’s speculative choir was informed by theoretical models drawn both from sound studies and from environmental humanities, as well as a down-to-earth, humorous sensitivity towards the limitations and absurdities of artistic practice. Where much theory associated with sound art and experimental music sees sound as what Ochoa Gautier has critiqued as an ontological suture for repairing the fractured relationship between humans and nature, Clover’s practice offers a more ambivalent and, I argue, therefore more generative means of conceptualising the role of sound within more-than-human social worlds. In particular, it uses sound to draw attention to the apprehension of humans by other creatures and to various dynamics of evasion, non-encounter and undecidability in our relationships with the more-than-human world. By amplifying this alternative way of understanding sound and listening, this article seeks to recast projects of social engagement through sound in more speculative and expansive terms.

This article focuses on critically provincialising some of the ethico-political challenges inherent to much of the acoustic ecology vocabulary and conceptual framework. As we will demonstrate, much of the underlying limitations stem from an adherence to a particular self-transformation praxis (from the ‘New Age’ movement) alongside an overtly optimist and culturally selective outlook on how a well-informed acoustic designer would guide individuals and communities to a better sonic world. This epistemological and aesthetic outlook is presented in order to offer an alternative view on how collaborative works that deal with the sonic can take place within communities. One, where rigid hierarchies and orthodoxies are substituted by an intersubjective listening that changes all actors involved in the process. This is the framework from which we present Cildo Meireles’s Sal Sem Carne LP (1975) and Lilian Nakahodo’s sonic cartography Mapa sonoro CWB: Uma cartografia afetiva de Curitiba (2015–).

This article examines creative sound practitioners who audibly convey social justice commentary through their use of environmental soundscapes as source material. I discuss how micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, electronic music artist Muqata’a and audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti work with field recordings to produce subversive counter-narratives against news media and state discourses. I outline three specific sound projects as case studies: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance of police encounters within the predominantly poor and Black neighbourhood of Springfield, Illinois; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) composed using field recordings of Ramallah, West Bank; and DeLaurenti’s radio piece Fit the Description (2015) that incorporates field recordings of the protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I argue that composing with soundscapes of contested urban spaces can function as sonic activism that confronts the oppressive soundscapes of systemic racism. The case studies are examined through the following common themes: 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power. Finally, I suggest how these case studies convey the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies.

Between March and May 2020, an estimated 37 million people across the United Kingdom took part in the ‘Clap for Carers’ initiative against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic. Participants stood on their doorsteps or balconies, or at their windows to clap, cheer and make other sounds, officially in praise of public health workers. The initiative was unique in British history, comparable in mass engagement only to certain instances of the ‘minute’s silence’, yet diametrically opposed in the sonic agency it appeared to permit. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as published documentation and media reports, I ask how this sonic agency was made use of and managed, and to what ends. Charged with the emotional and political weight of the pandemic, Clap for Carers was an increasingly ambivalent phenomenon. While it might not present itself as an artistic practice, participants’ evident attention to sonic materiality justifies approaching it as such. Moreover, exploratory uses of sound and a proliferation of interpretive positions suggested it held some space for the autonomous experiences art entails. While the initiative’s narrowly defined consensus mirrored the pitfalls of some participatory art, these autonomous experiences gestured towards what Voegelin (2019) describes as an ‘echography of the inaudible’, through which a plurality of voices, actualities and political possibilities are heard. In this sense, such experiences of Clap for Carers point to sound’s distinctive capacity for (per)forming agonistic kinds of participatory practice.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary situation. Social distancing has impacted the vast majority of people, reorganising society, physically separating us from friends, family and colleagues. Collectively we found ourselves in a distributed state, reliant upon digital technologies to maintain social and professional connections. Some activities can translate unabated to a digital medium, with benefits, such as the convenience inherent in many online shopping and banking services. Other activities, particularly those which are socially engaged, including inclusive music-making or design, may need to be re-framed and re-thought due to the absence of in-person contact.

In Northern Ireland, the Performance Without Barriers (PwB) research group works with disabled artists from the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland (DMNI) to identify ways in which technology can remove access barriers to music-making. Since disabled people are experts in their unique lived experience of disability, they must be involved in the design process, an approach known as participatory design. At the end of 2020, many of us are still adjusting to the new normal, only beginning to understand the impact of distributed digital living. In this article, we examine how the socially engaged work of PwB has been affected, changed and adapted during the pandemic throughout 2019 to 2020, expanding ideas of distributed creativity to the notion of distributed design. The authors formalise the concept of socially engaged distributed participatory design, an approach that classifies PwB’s current research activities in the area of accessible music technology design and improvised musicking. Consideration is given to the impact the notion of ‘distribution’ has on degrees of participation.

This article details the rationale and creative process behind a collaborative – or more accurately in this case, dialogic – sound composition undertaken as part of research into the acoustic ecologies of people in the early stages of a dementia. Changes in abilities around hearing and listening are among the first symptoms of many types of dementia, making such auditory phenotypes an increasingly common part of lived experiences of sound. Following acoustic ecology practice in doing and presenting research in sound, and more specifically Steven Feld in doing so in dialogic or polyvocal ways, co-composition can be a way of exploring the particularities of others’ hearing, listening and sound practices, which is less reliant on the discursive frames of interlocutors and researchers. The process of making sound art together draws attention to particular sounds and experiences, creating dialogic situations of companion listening, discussion and mutual learning. It also provides a framework for engaging interlocutors in soundscape and ethnographic fieldwork methods. The composition discussed here, Trevurr, documents my time working with Trevor, a keen amateur musician in Cornwall who has mild cognitive impairment, and gradually comes to simulate his experience of hyperacusis in a piece of dialogic, auraldiversity-oriented composition.

Music composition is traditionally regarded as an act of individual creation and expression, but can be approached, through the aid of digital platforms, as an activity that encourages learning through social participation. This article describes the development of a tablet-based app, Paynter, intended as a digital graphic interface for group collaborative composition and its experimental use in a primary school in Salford, UK, alongside musicians from the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. The app created a framework for a negotiated language of symbols used by two groups of students at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 to tell stories through sound and music. Its functionality enabled compositional thinking to emerge collectively from groups with relatively little exposure to the idea of composing and little knowledge of traditional notational or digital sequencing technologies. The research is grounded in a theoretical context of constructivist approaches to education.

Sound maps, particularly the web-based examples that have proliferated since the early 2000s, have proven compelling and valuable as means of conveying diverse perspectives of urban, rural and wilderness sound environments, while opening the creative process of mapping through field recording to non-expert user groups. As such, sound maps hold the promise of broad public engagement with everyday sonic experience and spatial typologies. Yet this straightforward participatory aim is prone to complication in terms of participatory frameworks and scale of analysis. Drawing on a catalogue of sound maps by the author, this article problematises the participatory norms of sound mapping and, in tandem, calls for a more nuanced approach to scale than typically seen to date in sound maps based on geospatial mapping APIs. A sound mapping workshop in Lisbon with a multidisciplinary participant group provided the opportunity to ‘re-prototype’ sound maps at the scale of a local neighbourhood using multimodal means of representation; the results highlighted questions of form, scale, representation, authorship and purpose in sound mapping and demonstrated its continuing potential as a participatory practice.

This qualitative inquiry into contemporary experiences of human migration, focusing on Anglo olim (English-speaking Jewish diaspora immigrants to Israel) uses interdisciplinary soundscape composition as its primary method. This project is opportune, given the lack of scholarship utilising sound to explore diaspora and Jewish identity. The compositional process was led by the experiences of the interviewees, blending sounds from places familiar to them, melodies and sonic symbolism that mark the seasons of the Jewish year and their own voices telling the story of their journeys. The composition is multilayered, allowing for a rich insight into the in between that diaspora communities inhabit, both in the place they live and in the place they left behind. This article discusses methodological decisions throughout the different stages of the project, with the aim to encourage readers to develop their own work utilising sound to investigate diaspora communities. This investigation sits at the crossroads between the aesthetic concerns connected to the ‘art’ of soundscape composition and the ethical considerations of the ‘science’ of social inquiry. The article concludes that sound studies, and soundscapes in particular, is an especially apt and rich avenue for study of diaspora identities and the oral traditions that underpin them.

This article aims to explore how the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of sonic art and creative oral history may work together to enhance the public response of socially engaged, interdisciplinary artwork. The main topics of discussion will include Panos Amelides’s paper ‘Acousmatic Storytelling’, the socio theoretical approach suggested by Salome Voegelin in her paper ‘Sonic Memory Material as “Pathetic Trigger”’, the behavioral study from the oral history sound installation by Dr Luis Sotelo Castro called Not Being Able to Speak is Torture, and the Deep Listening and Sonic Meditation practices and teachings of Pauline Oliveros, as well as compositions by Yves Daoust, Hildegard Westerkamp and Trevor Wishart. One consistent theme revealed through these investigations was that socially engaged, aurally focused artwork informed and woven by familiar and documented ‘life’ sounds or nostalgic sound events increases emotional triggers for the audience, creating a deeper engagement with the art piece or performance. Furthermore, an informed and host-led directive encouraging participatory and attentive listening through either meditation or discussion increases audience reception and takeaway, thus inspiring and unifying mass group empathy. This article suggests that the application of these techniques by electroacoustic composers, sonic artists, oral historians and interdisciplinary artists will create informed, passionate and empathetic listening spaces that live beyond the insular, creative experience itself.

This article considers the ways in which soundwalking and field recording entangle the listener in a sociopolitical relationship with place. The place is a physical site in which the listener encounters complex sonic sociopolitical factors, shaped not just by the interactions of people but also by involving living and material objects that voice themselves through sound and vibrations. Sets of expectations and personal identities inform listening experiences, in addition to the material-orientated tendencies in the field, deriving from soundscape composition and acousmatic music. Specific sociopolitical examples that inform sonic experiences in diverse listening situations across different geographic regions are used to uncover bias, and some of the preconceptions of listeners. The article argues for a greater reflexivity in regard to the motives that inform our listening, relationship with places and awareness of the widest spectrum of cultural, historic and sociopolitical contexts.

In this article I discuss how Áine O’Dwyer and Graham Lambkin’s 2018 album Green Ways connects with recent criticisms of sound mapping practices. Following an interpretation put forward by the artists themselves, I investigate the cartographic aspects of their project, and how these are conveyed in an album format. The concept of cartophony, suggested elsewhere by Samuel Thulin, is employed as a way to consider different relationships between sound and mapping practices that extrapolate common assumptions of what sound maps are and how they operate. First, I listen to how the artists create sonic performances in which they interact with different elements of the places they are performing in, making sounds not only in the place but also with the place. Then, I consider the different ways in which specificities of place are mapped through the incorporation of speech and singing. Finally, I show how the album’s underlying narratives directly address the problematic distinction between performance situations and everyday life. Considering the project’s unusual emphasis on the artists’ presence, as well as its incorporation of speech, singing and artistic performances, I suggest that Green Ways invites us to broaden our understanding of what field recordings and sound maps can be.