Audio Walks: The purpose, practice and politics of production

Audio walks have increasingly been adopted by the tourist and leisure sector as a way of introducing people to material and audio landscapes. By providing people with tracks that correspond to places set out on a map, people are taken on a journey around and through different worlds, listening to accounts, histories, stories and tales about the places they are walking through, allowing the encounter of the ‘surprise of space’ (Massey, 2005); those hidden, concealed, unobserved or forgotten aspects of the landscape. While there has been an explosion in recent years of walking and mobile methods (Anderson, 2004; Wylie, 2005; Moles, 2008), audio walks have yet to enter the methods toolbox in any great capacity. We argue in this short paper that audio walks can offer an interesting method for exploring the
deep connections that exist between people and places and outline the practical ways in which they can be used in research, how they are used and why they might be used, informed by two different engagements with them as method and practice in work we have done.