“Mapmaker, mapmaker, show me a map so that I may hear the world”
To know the Arctic rather than believe in the Arctic requires an ontological politics that makes space for the land, the climatic and hydrological processes taking place on that land, and the beings who choose to inhabit it. Through the Arctic Auditories project, we have worked to open up new conceptual spaces for the sounds of the land, these processes and these beings. Over the coming months we are making exciting plans to work with the city of Tromsø, to audibly transform urban space so that it may be known in a new way. Is there a map that could express that transformation? And if so, what would it look like?
See what I did there? I assumed that a map must look like something. Maps show us a representation of something, and even if that something is ideas or concepts (e.g. concept mapping), the one thing all maps have in common is that they are visual. As a geographer with training in cartography and GIS (geospatial information systems and science), I have always known that maps are tangible and material items. My additional training in critical cartography taught me to question maps in terms of what they represent, who they are for, and how they are used for political aims, which is to say I can tell you all about how maps are biopolitical tools that make landscapes and places governable and controllable. I never questioned this idea of what maps are in the ways I have done since joining Arctic Auditories, but now I will. For, in thinking about the nature of sound and its co-constitutive relationship to place, I would like to suggest that we proceed very carefully with soundmaps; that we need a critical cartography of soundmapping to make us aware of, attentive to, even provoked by, the biopolitical nature of the soundmap.
Arctic Auditories began with the foundational premise that the Arctic soundscape has value through the presence and in relationship with humans and Earth kin; that the soundscape itself is co-constituted and given meaning through the co-creation of relational value with other beings. In this articulation, sounds of wind blowing through towns, the churn of electric cable cars, the hum of electric wires, all convey meaning and presence. This premise is in contrast with the mainstream normative understanding of the Arctic soundscape as one that has traditionally aligned with a European understanding of Pristine Nature, one in which the Arctic is either quiet and silent, or filled with the deafening sounds of nature itself – wind blowing snow, ice cracking and squeaking, birds crying. As natural sounds, birds, wind, and even silence remain representation of a Pristine soundscape.
What continues to draw so many people to the Arctic is the attraction of both pristine nature and its assumed companion, the pristine soundscape. Yet, when seen through a biopolitical lens we can interpret sound as an expression of bodies alive and otherwise, of sensibilities, of preferences and tastes. And like (sense of) place, sound is somehow both ephemeral and constant. We know we are in a place, but what are the boundaries of that place? How are these boundaries determined, accepted and socially reproduced? For if a place has no boundaries, how can it be defined, and if it cannot be defined, how can it be known? Like the horizon, argued Casey, place is always there but somehow can never be fixed. Sound is always there, even in its absence. “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” goes the old saying. Of course it does, and the idea that if no humans are there to hear it then a sound does not exist disallows all the bodies that are there, their sensibilities, preferences and tastes.
Here is the crux of the soundscape, and in association, the soundmap. To fix the soundscape onto paper in the form of the soundmap is to create boundaries around something that is fluid and ephemeral, to determine that sounds increase in value (or become at all) by making them visible to humans. Like landscape mapping was a way to know the land in order to govern it, soundmapping can be understood as a biopolitical act meant to elevate, standardize and normalize the human senses, creating a pathway to govern them.
Maps are an important biopolitical tool because of their ability to fix and make material/visible what can otherwise only be experienced. Visual representations of space, maps of landscapes are contested for what they include or exclude, yet they are recognized nevertheless most often as snapshots which accurately, if at varying levels of precision, inform action because they are interpretable. Following Sterne’s definition of the audiovisual litany, maps are objective representations of a spatial (visual) reality. A landscape map can show roadways and neighborhoods, powerlines and business zones. It can convey elevation and slope, land cover, wind direction, vegetation and soil types. The biopolitical dimension of these maps is that they enable governancebecause these things are understood as relatively static until a new map is created. Decisions are made based on what these maps show, which may or may not accurately reflect what exists in the world at a given time. While they are useful and interesting for lots of reasons, it is critical to remember that they are representations of a set of situated knowledges collected for a specific purpose. A side effect of that set of choices is that the map fixes place to become a place, at a point in time. Through this process a place becomes a location, which is to say the richness of place is lost.
Sound and soundscapes, by their very nature are constantly changing at a rate at which the idea of mapping them, at the very least requires serious consideration as to the epistemological value of such a tool, and at most could be considered as a form of ontological violence to the relational value otherwise created through experience. The ephemerality of sound means that like place-making, sound could in fact better be understood as sound-making, an epistemology of sound in which it is always becoming as an expression of a dialogue between a place and all of its abiotic and biotic inhabitants.
To go one step further, and in alignment with the ethical positionality of Arctic Auditories, through a critical cartography of soundmapping we introduce here the idea that audio recordings could be understood as counter-soundmaps. Angus Carlyle’s recent LP Powerlines, a recording of sounds in and around Tromsø/Romsa, could then be considered a counter-soundmap of the Arctic soundscape. While the cd still represents a series of snapshots in time, it rejects the idea that the sounds captured in the cd are elevated in meaning only once they are spatialized onto a visual map. This logic would suggest that to know the sound of a waterfall as a moment in time when water is liquid, falling, crashing, gurgling, spraying and playing is as much an expression of an objective reality in its own right, without the need to “place it in space”. It still informs us about climate, environment and the like. To hear other layers of sound – children playing, electric lines humming, cars honking – allows us to build a relational understanding and value for the waterfall where sound becomes a dialogic expression of a place and its sustainability (Barron and Losleben 2025).
In the last blog post Angus Carlyle introduced the concept of the audiovisual litany, and he reflected on how the sensory and intimate personal experiences of the soundwalks, a core part of our project, were transformed into more objective, statistical operations through the creation of the soundmap he later generated. We did this work intentionally and thoughtfully and we stand by it. At the same time, the feminist epistemological stance at the core of our project encourages us to question our own motivations and the outcomes of our work. In this post I have reflected on the nature of sound and its relationship with human ideals of pristine Nature and place, and how soundmaps can be interpreted as biopolitical artifacts which in fact deconstruct and transform sound into something else in ways that, upon further reflection, we may not actually want or agree with. I have suggested that soundmaps do to sound what landscape maps do to place, they are transformative in making the complex and experiential more simplistic and fixed. For better and worse, maps make sound and place knowable, shareable, governable. As a team of interdisciplinary academics, we want to know more about sounds and places, and we want to share that knowledge. As feminists, we know that that knowledge is powerful and always partial. As a geographer, I know that maps are the same, and as a person I want to use that partial, powerful knowledge for good.
Elizabeth Barron, 2025
Further reading:
Barron, E.S. and K. Losleben. 2025. “Emplacing watery encounters: Listening, care, and embodied knowledge in places of climate change.” Progress in Environmental Geography 4(2): 190-207. DOI: 10.1177/27539687251342262
Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press.