Our presentation focuses on the Walking Festival of Sound, a joint initiative we founded in 2019. This transdisciplinary event explores the critical and creative roles of walking and listening in experiencing our everyday surroundings and environments. It features a range of free, public events, including walking performances, alternative city tours, soundwalks, nomadic seminars, and listening sessions, all held in diverse public spaces. The festival is not tied to one location but travels to different cities every two years, inviting local artists and communities to participate in forming a temporary congregation of soundwalkers.

The thoughts, discussions, and relationships sparked during these events resonate across time and space—an aspect we intend to explore more closely in our presentation. To introduce reflections on the resonances, but also dissonances, that our festival has fostered since its inception, we invite participants of the SAR conference to join us for a hybrid soundwalk.

While walking, we will share various approaches used by us and previous festival contributors to draw attention to the often imperceptible aspects of our shared environments. What kinds of resonant and dissonant relationships can slow walking and attentive listening to our surroundings bring to light? How can the resonance that emerges from these aesthetic experiences extend beyond the framework of the event and into everyday life?

During the walk, participants—equipped with audio receivers—will listen to an evolving soundscape that blends the immediate sounds of the environment with archival recordings from the festival’s history, along with reflections from participating artists. The soundwalk will conclude with a collective discussion where, besides the aforementioned questions, we will reflect on how the festival framework, this but also more generally, can function as an artistic research methodology.