Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in the Our Dee Estuary Project, a project which aimed to engage participants into an understanding and stewardship of the Dee Estuary, the aspect I was involved in looked into how people connect with sound, place, and community. My role on the project began as facilitating field recording workshops for the participants, but as the project progress the emergence of new soundscape methods came to the fore, along side the final aim of helping bring the co-created creative outputs (a film and a radio soundscape) into the being for public dissemination. What’s been especially exciting has been the emergence of a new method called Soundtalking.

What Is Soundtalking?

Soundtalking is a practice-led, participant-driven way of exploring soundscapes. It differs from more passive or expert-led soundscape methods in that it encourages people to do three things:

Listen deeply, not just in silence or walking through a space, but returning regularly, allowing their ears and awareness to adjust with time.
Talk about what they hear, sharing memories, resonances, experiences, reflections, environmental awareness, emotional responses either in real time or soon after listening exercises.
Build relationships with place and with each other, as both listening and talking happen across multiple sessions, allowing for changes, surprises, and growing familiarity.

Through monthly meetings over a year, people taking part in the project engaged in sound workshops, sound-making, recording, and open discussion. They explored how their estuary changed around them and them around it. How the Dee’s ebb and flow, ecology, weather, human presence shaped their experience, and in turn how their own lives, stories, memories, and wellbeing were shaped NOT just by the sounds, but by the experience of being present.

This project was unique as it was not about building a theory first and then imposing it; Soundtalking emerged through doing and listening, co-creating both understanding and artefacts (film, soundscape) with the community.

Key Outputs & Publications

Soundtalking: Extending Soundscape Practice Through Long-Term Participant-Led Sound Activities in the Dee Estuary, Sustainability, 2025 — my most recent paper that lays out the method in full. Read the article
Extending Soundwalking Practice: Soundsitting as an Inclusive and Complementary Method to Soundwalking, Acoustics, 2023 — an earlier paper introducing “Soundsitting,” another method more static than soundwalking, and one that feeds into the thinking behind Soundtalking. Read that paper

These works have helped to shape not just how I approach sound and listening in research, but also how I see community, memory, place, and well-being as integral parts of sound practice.

Why Soundtalking Matters

What I’ve found most powerful about Soundtalking are the effects that grow over time:

Heightened sensory awareness: participants often talk about hearing things they would normally ignore or not realise were part of their soundscape. Sounds which then became special through attachment. Regular return visits help those sounds become more present.
Emotional connection & wellbeing: place attachment, memories, reflections, even feelings of calm or stress relief were recurring themes. Listening deeply or NOT at all and sharing what emerges seems to help people feel more grounded with place. Field recording was a catalyst to self reflection and mindfulness.
Sense of community and shared language: as participants meet monthly, they begin to reference similar moments from their own or their peers sound recordings which were played back and built ways of talking about listening together.

Because the method is longitudinal (over time), participant-led, and dialogic, it captures more than just what a place sounds like in a snapshot, it captures how place a sense of place and people co-shape each other.

Recent Presentation

I was pleased to present this work at the Sound + Environment Symposium 2025 in Newcastle, held on the 4th-6th of September. It was a great opportunity to share the ideas behind Soundtalking with researchers and practitioners working in soundscape, ecology, public health, and community engagement, and to hear feedback that I’m already using to shape the next phase of this research.

Looking Forward

There’s more to explore. I’m keen to see how Soundtalking works in other places, landscapes, and communities. I want to test how it could be used in environmental planning and public health, not just artistic or research settings. And of course, how to scale it in ways that preserve its participatory, reflective, and relational core.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this project, the participants, partners, listeners, colleagues. For me, Soundtalking has been more than a project; it’s reshaped what listening means, how sound matters, and how we might all connect a little more deeply with the places we live in.

If you’re curious to read the papers, listen to the radio soundscape, or see the film, I’ll soon share links here.