Abstract

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Soundscape concepts have been employed for more than 20 years to enrich audiovisual studies. They have also been debated extensively. This chapter addresses soundscape as shifting, processual, historical, and produced in contingent situations. It focuses on a specific aspect of methodology that is useful for considering how to advance research on the audiovisual: methods in motion. Soundscape studies have stressed that researchers sometimes need to leave the “laboratory” and venture into fieldwork. Some of the recent developments in the “marriage” of soundscape and audiovisual studies are described, with three goals: to direct attention to soundscape studies as the art and scholarly study of listening, to introduce the sensory memory walk, and to introduce the listening walk. Sound studies are increasingly employed as a basis for developing multisensory methodologies of studying times, spaces, and materialities to relocate sensate users of space at the center of the researcher’s attention.