Sounding bodies along the UKK hiking trail, Finland

The paper discusses sounding bodies and more-than-human relations within tourism practices. It joins emerging attempts to challenge the anthropocentric tourism paradigm and to recognise more-than-human entanglements by engaging with sound through a relational approach. Rather than thinking of the soundscape as the aural equivalent to the visual panorama, which one visits and listens to passively from a distance, we explore the idea of intra-active ‘sounding bodies’ which share the atmosphere with other sounding bodies as they move, and are, in Tim Ingold’s words, ‘ensounded’ during the practice of hiking. The study is grounded in a longer-term engagement by the researcher-practitioners along the UKK hiking trail in Finland and draws upon empirical listening encounters as part of multispecies ethnography in the summer months of 2024. Through the use of the Merlin Bird ID app and an AudioMoth remote sensing device, the paper explores how various listening and sounding practices can stretch our anthropocentric ears and lead to new, more-than-human ethical considerations for tourism practices and infrastructures amidst the ongoing ecological crisis.