A Autumn Afternoon Soundwalk  in Fernald Preserve 

Rich Bitting, Mack Hagood, and Nathan Morehouse                                                                 10/11/2025      1:30 PM 

A soundwalk is a mindful walk with a focus on listening to the environment. In western society we listen with our eyes  we expect to hear what our eyes are focused on. Since we have no earlids  we filter out unwanted sounds with our brain and pay most attention to those sounds associated with visual signals. We have learned to ignore the subtle ambient sounds collected by our ears. 

Use this guide is a series of prompts to assist in mindful listening. Walk quietly and listen. If you must talk, use a whisper. We will discuss what we heard at the end of the walk.

1. At the Program Shelter

• Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. 
• Try to move without making any sound. Is it possible?
• Which is the quietest sound of your body? 
• If you cannot hear the sounds you yourself produce, you experience a soundscape out of balance.

"Walk as if you are walking on your ears” - Pauline Oliveros

2. At the First Listening spot 

Set up recording equipment

 Lead your ears away from your own sounds and listen to the sounds nearby. 

• Has the resonance changed from the trailhead?
• What do you hear?
• Other people? Mechanical sounds? (Anthrophony) 
• Nature sounds? (Biophony)
• Wind or water sounds? (Geophony) 
• Listening in stereo  - panning and balance 

3. At the Second Listening Spot 

How many continuous sounds can you detect? 

• Ostinatos?
• Polyphony?
• -  Highest pitch? 
• Lowest pitch? 
• Amplitude? (loud/soft)
  - Amplitude Envelopes? (Crescendos/decrescendos)
• Simultaneities?
• What Ambient Sounds do you hear? 
• Masking?

4. At the Third Listening Spot 

• Do you hear any intermittent or discrete sounds? (Sound signals)
  Rustles? Bangs? Swishes? Thuds? Barks? Hoots? Whistles? Psithurism?
  Do you hear any periodic sounds (rhythm)? 
• Interesting rhythms? 
• Regular beats? (i.e. a heartbeat)
• What are the Keynotes? 

5. At the Fourth Listening Spot 

• Lead your ears away from these local sounds and listen beyond, into the distance. 
• What Sound objects do you hear? 
• How do they differ in types of sound? 
• What is the quietest sound? 
• Was it briefly masked by a louder sound?
• What Soundmark do you think is characteristic of this place? 

“When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me.”  - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

6. Back at the Program Shelter

• So far you have isolated sounds from each other in your listening and gotten to know them as individual entities. But each one of them is part of a bigger environmental composition.  Now reassemble them all and imagine listening to them as if listening to a piece of music played by many exotic instruments.
• Do you like what you hear?
• Pick out the sounds that you like the most and create the ideal soundscape in the context of your present surroundings (i.e. focus on your favorite sounds)
• What are your favorite sounds? 
• Do you think an ideal soundscape is an idealistic dream or could it be made a reality? 
• Learn to listen to the soundscape and discover your own “symphony.

Glossary 

Acousmatic  - a description for sounds whose sources are out of sight or unknown. This also relates to acousmatic music. 

Ambient sound  - the background sounds which are present in a scene or location.

Amplitude envelope – the changes in the amplitude of a sound over time. 1.e. Crescendo/decrescendo

Anthrophony – sounds by humanmade objects such as machines, friction from road noise, bells, sirens. 

Biophony – sounds created by biological organisms, mostly insects, amphibians, birds and mammals.

Geophony – sounds from the movement of wind and water. Driven mostly by climate. Running streams, rain and wind.

Keynote  - typically ambient sounds which are not perceived, not because they are inaudible but because they are filtered out cognitively, such as a highway or air-conditioner hum) 

Masking  - when one sound covers or veils another sound

Ostinato - a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm

Pitch - the degree of highness or lowness of a tone

Polyphony - simultaneously combining a number of distinct sounds, each forming an individual melody or line.

Rhythm -an arrangement of sounds, principally according to duration and periodic stress

Schizophonia - a term coined by R. Murray Schafer to describe the splitting of an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction. Any sound can be recorded and thus played back anywhere at any time.

Simultaneity (i.e. chords) - sound events existing, occurring, or operating at the same time; concurrent: as in a musical chord.

Soundmark - a sonic landmark; a sound which is characteristic of a place.

Soundscape - the sounds heard in a particular location, considered as a whole.

Sound signal - a foreground sound; e.g. a dog, an alarm clock; messages/meaning is usually carried through sound signals. 

Sound object - the smallest possible recognizable sonic entity (recognizable by its amplitude envelope) 

Timbre - the characteristic quality of a sound, independent of pitch and loudness, from which its source or manner of production can be inferred.

Selected Reading  

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. (50th Anniversary edition, Wesleyan, 2013, ISBN-10: 0819573655) 

Pettman, Dominic, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Techniques or How to Listen to the World. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017

Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. 

(The Soundscape) (1977) ISBN 978-0-394-40966-5, republished as The Soundscape (1994) ISBN 978-0-89281-455-8.

Westerkamp, Hildegard. Soundwalking, “Sound Heritage”, Vol. III No. 4, 1974. Reprinted and updated in Carlyle, Angus (ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris, 2007: 49-54.

Field Notes