Resounding Legacies: Audio Walks as a Site-Specific Tool

Audio walks, in which pre-recorded audio is played while moving through a specific location, is a tool that allows for immersive, unexpected ways of experiencing a place. Such walks involve embodied, affective engagement that loosens the boundaries between past and present and allows for intimate explorations of the tensions between "then" and "now." When different temporalities overlay, participants may sense an uncanny disjuncture involving the histories that continue to “haunt” sites, and may come away with a fresh vision about a familiar location.
Alongside their aesthetic value and potential as a research tool, audio walks can have practical significance. In regions with strong oral traditions, such as in Eastern Africa, they can help to disseminate knowledge in a manner that is relatively intuitive. Using recordings of contemporary voices and soundscapes, and potentially combining them with archival tracks, audio walks can become tools that not only recount fixed histories but also invite communities to jointly curate their own narratives, shaping local memories and rendering them accessible to non-specialists.
Developed within the framework of ERC Starting Grant AfDevLives (2022-2027), which studies lasting legacies of development interventions in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, our presentation will discuss our tentative use of audio walks as a research tool, a mode of participatory documentation, and a category of output. We will discuss not only promises but also challenges, notably with regard to participation and ethics. By drawing inspiration from both academic and artistic sources, and incorporating feedback from a range of case studies across Eastern Africa, we seek to develop audio walks as intellectually rigorous, ethically sound, and useful for local communities. In line with this panel, we will also reflect on the possibility of integrating audio archives into audio walks and into related outputs such as static, site-specific sound spots.