In my last post No plan, just cities, I wrote about how slowing down and opening ourselves to a city without expectations can reveal something deeper than landmarks or instagram moments.
Over this year I’ve been living in Dublin and traveling Europe, that “something deeper” became materializing in a couple of questions.
How the city feels when we stop to listen what is happening?
How can we tell one city from another just by its sounds?
Can we record a city as an audio portrait?
Walking without a plan, I found myself recording short clips of Dublin’s sounds: layered voices around O’Connell St, seagulls screeching, pints clinking, the iconic pedestrian beeping sound, the distant bell from Luas.
These were not background noise, they were shaping how I experienced space and presence.
That shift from seeing to hearing echoes what sound researchers like Roxanne Layton describe in this TEDx talk on how the soundscape affects our body and minds. Layton explains that our auditory system is always on, we cannot close our ears as we do our eyes, and that sound can tigger emotional and physiological responses, from tension to calm. This means sound is inseparable from how we inhabit environments and relate to them emotionally and physically.
Listening in this way is active. It requires slowing down, decentering sight, and allowing sounds to arrive before we interpret them. On a busy Dublin street, this meant noticing how human voices and footsteps blend with the city’s rhythm. Near the river after a couple of hours of rain, it meant recognizing how water’s soft movement differs from the traffic’s urgency. At night on my quiet neighborhood, silence became a sound in itself. Like the city allowing me to get home and rest.
These experiences guided the soundscape podcast I§m embedding below. Instead of narrating streets or monuments, the audio invites you to listen, to let your attention move from sound to meaning from surface to depth and to notice how sounds shaper our sense of place.
I invite you to press play, put on your head phones and lean into listening. Then, next time you walk, whether here in Dublin, back home or anywhere in between. Try it again, no plan, just listening.
