Sonic methods in geography

Research into sound—including both musical and nonmusical sound—amounts to a varied body of work that straddles numerous disciplines, including history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, musicology, and ecology. Scholarship focused on sound has also led to the formation of discrete subdisciplines, most notably sound studies, bioacoustics, and acoustic ecology. Much of this wealth of material considers the spatial properties of sounds and their reception (both by humans and nonhumans), yet geographers have been relatively slow to consider sound in a systematic manner, and explicitly geographical studies of sound remain few and far between, even if this has picked up since the 2000s, especially by cultural geographers (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Geographies of Music, Sound, and Auditory Culture”). Much of the geographical scholarship on sound and music, which, broadly constituted, has been referred to as audio geography or sonic geography, has tended to rely upon already existing methods of data collection, analysis, and (re)presentation, including interviews, close textual readings, and written forms of dissemination. Of course, such methods remain invaluable, and they have their own particular sonorities, yet they also raise important questions that sound researchers are only just starting to grapple with. Principally, it has been questioned whether existing research methods need to be extended or complemented, or new ones initiated, so as to account for the diverse ways in which sounds produce spaces, and how spaces affect sounds and their reception at different scales, as well as helping to generate entirely new forms of data. This has been met by a range of responses that generally do not reject existing ways of undertaking research, but instead seek to complement them