Maps have long been produced across different cultures to help humans better navigate the world. Predominantly, they’ve relied on visual aspects of the environment, such as landmarks or changes in topography, but a different kind of map exists that relies on another sensory experience – that of sound. Such maps subvert the visual aspects of a location and instead require a listening ear to uncover aspects of an environment that are often invisible to a visually centric society.
Sonic research
In the late 1960s, researcher R Murray Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project – aresearch group based at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada, focused on studying, balancing and improving the sonic environment. Employing a variety of sonic research methods and acoustic ecology theories, its work was instrumental in the development of sound mapping – using sound as the primary orientation to map an environment. This process allowed researchers to connect to the sonic markers (or soundmarks) of a space and to understand ecological and cultural changes over time.