Urban research has traditionally privileged the visual — maps, photographs, sightlines. Sensory ethnography argues that sound carries just as much information about a place, and often reaches the researcher first: church bells marking the hour, a specific vendor's call, the particular hum of traffic on one street versus its silence two blocks over.
Soundwalks, in which researchers move through a neighborhood recording and annotating what they hear, have become a recognized method for documenting these urban soundscapes. What counts as 'noise' to be regulated and what counts as valued ambient sound is itself a social and often contested judgment, frequently split along class and generational lines.
Sound also marks time in ways that formal schedules do not capture. Long-term residents can often identify the hour of day by the specific combination of sounds outside their window — a level of embedded knowledge that a newcomer, however observant, typically takes months to acquire.
Attending to sound pushes urban anthropology to treat the city as something inhabited by the whole body, not simply observed by the eye.