Since their emergence in the 1960s, soundwalks have expanded from technology-free listening events into interactive, site-responsive works mediated through smartphones and geolocative audio. In doing so, they open up innovative ways of weaving sound in dialogue with place—offering museums a culture-led interpretive approach beyond physical buildings, extending into landscapes and communities, and engaging new audiences in immersive, situated ways.

In this paper, I advocate for soundwalking as a decolonial, community-centred practice that can extend the museum beyond the gallery. Drawing on Paul Basu’s concept of the “pluriversal museum” (2024) and his call for ecologies of knowledges, alongside Dylan Robinson’s writing on practices of decolonial listening (2020), I propose that soundwalks can provide space to foster reciprocal and context-sensitive engagement with place. They challenge extractive listening modes, support Indigenous and autochthonous sovereignty, and provide museums with tools to centre consent, cultural specificity, and community-held knowledge.

To demonstrate this, the paper draws upon Machair, a geolocative soundwalk created in collaboration with communities on the Uists, Western Isles of Scotland. Developed with Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, the work is mapped to an established walking route across the machair landscape on the island of Benbecula. Machair, a Gàidhlig word for ‘fertile low-lying grassy plain’, is one of Europe’s rarest and most species-rich habitats. Shaped over millennia through sustained human intervention, the machair is a living landscape where intangible knowledge of land has been passed down orally from generation to generation, without recourse to the written code.

Combining spoken word, music, soundscapes, and repatriated archive recordings, Machair offers a community-rooted alternative to institutionally bound heritage. This paper shares practice-based insights from the development of Machair, exploring how soundwalking can support placemaking, cultural resurgence, and more inclusive, ethical approaches to museum practice, demonstrated with audio excerpts from the work throughout.