Sound and the Everyday in Qualitative Research

Abstract

In this article, a constitutive aspect of the everyday world is attended to, which is too often absent or suppressed in social scientific accounts of social life: noise. A question is raised as to how social science has addressed the question of noise, through a reconsideration of sound and the everyday. Conventional “good practice” for the organization and conduct of research interviews is compared with alternative approaches more open to the space of everyday sounds, and the practice of soundwalking—the mobile exploration of (local) space and sounds—is offered as a productive context for the creative disturbance of the conventional interview. In closing, some of the possibilities of noise as these have been brought home to us in our own research with young people in noisy, everyday settings are set out.