This audio paper explores through a ‘thinking out loud’ how sound art and specifically soundwalking practices in the landscape can contribute to the discussion of contested histories through the creation of immersive sonic encounters. The paper takes as its starting point a recently completed PhD research project in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland which explored the colonial-era archives of an Irish aristocratic family through walking and listening.

The thesis, ‘Killruddery: Listening to the Archive’ explored what it means to listen to a written archive, in order to examine how that archive could be brought into the public realm as a walking experience, displacing the hidden voices, the sonic spectres of archive into the grounds of the Killruddery estate where they are summoned through the power of geo-location.

In this audio paper, the idea of ‘listening to the archive’ is brought to audition as a methodology for an artistic research process, how musing whilst walking (and simultaneously recording those thoughts) contributed to an artistic understanding of place and social context, through the interaction of the lived soundscape and the artist’s internal dialogue. The geo-located soundwalk that was produced as a result, ‘The Ancestors’ (currently live on the Echoes platform) re-enacts this listening process for the listener/walker as they encounter the titular ancestors, the landscape and architecture, whilst immersing themselves in over 400 years of archival material.

Using original field recordings from the Killruddery estate, overlaid with a central narrative voice, the artist-researcher attempts to think through a process of critical examination, sounding and experience, using the audio essay format.

“How do we walk this place,
In silence or in doubt?
How do we understand history,
Through architecture
or through absence”

(Young, 2020, Walk This Place)