Sound Ethnography

Often referred to as sonic ethnography, sound ethnography is the methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and ontological study of the sonic and its relationship to society, culture, and ecology. Sounds have, in fact, always been part of ethnographies, as sensations, understandings, artistic nonartistic expressions, recordings, and film/video and multimedia as technologies developed alongside ethnography and other methodologies. However, despite many ethnographic forms that attend to constructions of sound, such as ethnomusicology, sonic ethnography is a relatively new and still emerging methodology. The study of sound is multidisciplinary, informed by anthropology; sociology; ethnomusicology; acoustics; history; philosophy; sociology; medical studies; architecture; cultural geography; natural and physical sciences; performance and media studies; cultural studies; visual, performing, and mixed-media arts; and education research. Due to such interdisciplinarity, sound ethnography varies widely in terms of methods, theories, and practices. Sound ethnographies also differ in the purposes and conceptualizations of sound and study. They need not focus on organized sounds such as talk and music. They might also focus on emergent or sonic phenomena such as echoes and reverberations; ambient, found, or naturally occurring sounds in builtscapes or landscapes; music; sonic technologies; or even silence. Regardless of focus, sound ethnographers tend to examine the sonic in relation to social and/or environmental structures and patterns—not just how sound reflects such phenomena but, importantly, how it produces them. While ethnography has principally been a literary genre in the humanities and a qualitative research genre in the social sciences, a sound ethnography might be both conducted and presented in multiple ways, including writing, recording, composition, film, mixed media, art installation, and performance.