Tùn Resùn: Walking in the Sounding Forest

Abstract

This paper is based on interviews and conversations conducted while walking through the ‘Klangwald’, a ‘sounding forest’ in the Swiss mountains that features various musical instruments. While our initial intent was to reflect on hearing and listening to all the sounds of the forestscape, our walking conversations revealed a much more holistic sensory experience, and we began to ask the broader question of what it means to sensorially be in and move through the forest. Drawing on anthropology of the senses (Le Breton 2017 [2006]) and expanding on Tim Ingold’s work on movement, knowledge, description, and being in the world (2011), we propose a ‘sensory walking ethnography’. By walking alongside people as we interview them, the conversation – like the walking itself – becomes an experiential and sensorial process rather than a purely linguistic and semantic one. Thus, we explore not only people’s perceptions of the forest environment but also a methodology for investigating that perception. Accompanying interviewees as they articulated what they were sensing – particularly in the liminal spaces and concepts between within and outside of the forest, sound and silence, and constancy and change – provided a deeper understanding of how people relate to, experience, and perceive their lived environment.