Soundwalks first emerged in the 1960s as listening events that encouraged participants to engage directly with their auditory environment (Drever 2020). Initially free from technology, this practice has since expanded, incorporating portable media players, smartphones, and geolocative audio to create interactive works that blend recorded and environmental sounds. Recent advancements in GPS technology have further transformed soundwalks, enabling dynamic, location-specific soundscapes that merge the participant’s movement with layered sonic narratives mapped to a landscape.

This paper explores soundwalking as a creative and culture-led methodology for engaging with the cultural and ecological histories of rural environments. Drawing on Uist Soundwalks—a long-term project mapping sound-led journeys across Uist—I will examine how sound and listening function as both artistic practice and embodied research in outdoor spaces. The project’s prototypes, Machair and Orasaigh, use site-specific music and soundscape compositions, spoken word, and sound archives to create immersive, participatory journeys that foreground local cultural narratives, storytelling, and deep listening as tools for placemaking.

As composer Cathy Lane observes, “sound has a different perspective to offer... [and] can offer a new perspective and way of ‘knowing’ to others” (2011, p.122). Through this lens, I investigate how soundwalks can act as a form of commons-making, amplifying Indigenous and autochthonous knowledge of the land and its ecologies. By positioning Uist Soundwalks as a culture-led exploration of place and heritage, I argue that soundwalks offer an alternative mode of experiencing kinship, identity, and environmental change, one that moves beyond passive observation into embodied, participatory engagement.

In this presentation, I will consider how soundwalking as a creative practice transforms the outdoors into a site of artistic intervention, cultural storytelling, and ecological attunement. By centring listening as a performative act, Uist Soundwalks demonstrates the potential of sound-led practices to challenge conventional narratives of land use and history while fostering new relationships between communities, heritage, and the natural environment.

• Drever, John L. 2020. Listening as Methodological Tool: Sounding Soundwalking Methods. In: Michael Bull
and Marcel Cobussen, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies. London: Bloomsbury
Academic, pp. 599-613.
• Lane, Cathy. 2011. Listening for the Past, ‘Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures’,
Volume 5 Number 1, pp.114-127