Radical Walking Tours of NYC – Bruce Kayton
TNS library e-book [link here]
Few people know that Trotsky lived in New York just before the Russian Revolution. He lived in the Bronx and worked as a journalist in the East Village. This and many other intriguing facts are revealed in this new walking guide which eschews the usual guidebook fare and takes the reader to the battle sites of the class struggle. Illustrated with 30 b & w photographs.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – William Whyte
TNS Library recording [link here]
A small group of observers, the “Street Life Project”, sets out to study how people use the parks and plazas of the city. With the help of time-lapse filming they find that what makes a place work are the basics–a place to sit, for example, food, sun, a passing show.

The Sonic Life of Cities – Michael Southworth (PDF)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4w8kPKedvsVTjRVZXExVTJ2b0k/view?resourcekey=0-LZc8siir7XUsT0BgHp816g
…This study explores two aspects of the problem: What is the perceived variety and character of city sounds? How do sounds influence perception of the visible city? Our research is not a scientific experiment, but an exploratory study in which we have attempted to identify those issues that deserve more careful attention in later experimental research and city design.

Walking in the City (from the Practice of Everyday Life) Michel DeCerteau (PDF)
https://public.wsu.edu/~hegglund/courses/548space/decerteau_practice.pdf
In this essay he elaborates on an analogy between urban systems and language, with improvisational walking (shortcuts, wandering, etc) being like turns of phrase, inside jokes, or stories. He states, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”
He describes the city as “a space of enunciation,” where walkers demonstrate possibilities through their walking choices. He states, “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures.’ There is a rhetoric of walking.”

Acts of Air – Reshaping the Urban Sonic
http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/
Project launched during lockdown.
An online exhibition for offline participation – 14 relational sound art works that offer a means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound

Listening to the City Handbook:
Community Research and Action through Sound and Story
https://www.colab.mit.edu/resources-1/2018/4/2/listening-to-the-city-handbook
a 181-page toolkit dedicated to furthering civic engagement as expressed in sound studies research, art, and pedagogy published by MIT CoLab.

Listen – Max Neuhaus
https://www.kim-cohen.com/Assets/CourseAssets/Texts/Neuhaus_LISTEN.pdf
Neuhaus was perhaps the first person to be dubbed a “sound artist”. His first works in this realm were invitations for audiences to experience urban sounds in new ways.

R. Murray Schafer – The Sounding City
https://www.david-howes.com/senses/sensing-the-city-lecture-RMurraySchafer.htm
Interview with the Canadian composer and writer about his work with sound in the city. Of particular note if his use of the work “soundmarks”:
“Every city will have its landmarks and the longer they remain in place, the more cherished they may become, although there are often political or social changes that can affect their survival. In the soundscape too, there are sounds that obtrude over the acoustic horizon. We call these soundmarks and we can define soundmarks as prominent sounds possessing properties of uniqueness, symbolic power, or other qualities that make them especially conspicuous or respectfully regarded.”

*** For more info on this influential but complicated figure, see this excellent 2-part podcast from the show Phantom Power
https://phantompod.org/ep-29-r-murray-schafer-1933-2021-pt-1/
https://phantompod.org/ep-30-r-murray-schafer-pt-2-critiques-and-contradictions/

The Science and Art of Listening – Seth Horowitz (NY Times)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M3XejZpzlrPypp63Jp-QHwjS0WKXd2Zx/view?usp=sharing
“Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have
shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it,
the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at
least 10 times as fast.”

Soundcities
https://soundcities.com/
Soundcities was the first online open source database of global city sounds and soundmaps, using found sounds and field recording. There are now thousands of sounds from around the world on the website. This project allows the audience the possibility to remix the thousands of sampled recordings in an online database. The sounds can be listened to, used in performances, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. The soundcities database is also open so anyone can upload sounds they collect from world cities, thereby making a valuable and collaborative contribution to the project and helping to make this online sound archive.

Ultra-Red – Five Protocols for Listening
https://izk.tugraz.at/data/uploads/2017/03/02_five_protocols_for_organized_listening.pdf
a 181-page toolkit dedicated to furthering civic engagement as expressed in sound studies research, art, and pedagogy published by MIT CoLab.

Deep Listening Walks – Kathy Hinde
https://kathyhinde.co.uk/deep-listening-walks/
“In May 2019, Kathy Hinde invited people to join her on a ‘Deep Listening Walk’ to focus on the hidden sounds of Europe’s largest blanket bog in The Flow Country in the far north of Scotland. Using specialist listening devices such as hydrophones, she made audible the sonic qualities of peat gently moving, and tuned in to the minuscule sounds emitted by small organisms living within this rich and biodiverse ecosystem. Blanket bog is a very special ecosystem, and the idea of ‘Deep Listening’ in this context was to listen into the peat at different depths, and to think about listening ‘back in time’ as these deep layers of peat have taken centuries to form, preserving organisms within its layers. What is it like to listen to these layers and different depths that hold deep time?”

Hildegard Westerkamp  On Soundwalking
https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writingsby/?post_id=13&title=soundwalking
a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. She is a pioneering figure within the field of soundscape studies and sound ecology and an integral member of the World Soundscape Project. She presents soundscape workshops, performs, writes and lectures internationally.

Hearing Change in the Chocolate City:  Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2019/08/05/hearing-change-in-the-chocolate-city-soundwalking-as-black-feminist-method/
While we often think of soundwalks as engines of knowledge production, we must also consider that they may simultaneously silence divergent worldviews and perspectives of space and place. 

Sounding Out! Series: Soundwalking while POC
https://soundstudiesblog.com/category/soundwalking-while-poc/
Since its inception at the World Soundscape Project in the 1970s, soundwalking has emerged as a critical method for sound studies research and artistic practice. Although “soundwalking” now describes a diversity of activities and purposes, critical discussions and reading lists still rarely represent or consider the experiences of people of color (POC).

Sounding walking
https://www.ttbook.org/interview/soundwalking-city-david-rothenberg
The screeching of a fast-stopping car, the ding of an elevator, the flapping of pigeons, the clicks of heels, the whispered voices and voluble shouts. The sounds of a city are real and natural, in a different but no less arresting way from sounds in a forest, jungle, ocean or farm. Or so argues David Rothenberg, who co-produced an episode of “To the Best of Our Knowledge” that makes the case for exploring cities with our ears.

The Buried Brook
https://www.cityaslivinglab.org/the-buried-brook
In the Spring of 2022, CALL commissioned composer and sound artist Kamala Sankaram to develop The Buried Brook, a free, interactive augmented reality sound walk. It traces the sonic geography of the buried Tibbetts Brook, which once flowed from Yonkers through the Bronx to the Harlem River. While walking along the former route of the buried brook, the app invites users to turn a sensitive ear toward the past, present, and future of Tibbetts.

Soundwalk examples

Nightcall Radio. Radio – anthropocene entanglements. By Kate Donovan
https://fusion-journal.com/issue/019-listening-in-the-anthropocene/nightcall-radio-radio-anthropocene-entanglements/
“Expanded listening can mean exploring the boundaries of human sensory perception, throughvarious practices and technologies, to try to listen beyond human capabilities, to realise,recognise and reckon with the limits of human sensory perception. It can mean paying attentionto the silence and silencing, the untold or forgotten stories, the perspectives and knowledgesthat fall out of dominant modes of historicising (Donovan“Listening beyond Radio, listening beyond History”). It can mean imagining, speculating, fictioning, as inHaraway’s SpeculativeFabulation (SF) (Haraway, Truman).10 But it can also mean to expand perspectives andconsider listening from a non-human or more-than-human position”

Tactical Soundwalking in the City – A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear. by Stephanie Loveless
https://muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.newschool.edu/pub/6/article/775530
“This article investigates a turn from eye to ear in the literature and practice of walking-as-art. Arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world, the author examines the practice of soundwalking (Westerkamp) and Deep Listening (Oliveros), placing them in conversation with the work of Michel de Certeau, and concludes with a discussion of the creative projects of Suzanne Thorpe, Viv Corringham and Amanda Gutierrez in order to chart the importance of relational listening practices today.”

The Sonic Color Line – Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening – Jennifer Lynn Stoever
https://nyupress.org/9781479889341/
Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.”

The Microphone Ear: Field Recording the Soundscape – Hildegard Westerkamp
https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writingsby/?post_id=74&title=the-microphone-ear:-field-recording-the-soundscape
Westerkamp, also listed above in “Soundwalking” is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. In this writing she’s discussing her works for radio called Soundwalking. It’s worth reading the sections “Microphone Ears”, “The moving microphone”, “The searching microphone” the “The stationary microphone” for recording strategies in the field.
This is also an important statement:
“…the microphone does not make any choices. In itself it is without culture: the way it “listens” is determined entirely by its technical specifications and each recordist’s position and perspective, the physical, psychological, political and cultural stance shaping their choices. “

Transom – Sam Greenspan
https://transom.org/2013/sam-greenspan/
“Sam Greenspan has made such an effective case for MEANDERING as a production tool that you’ll want to get up and take a stroll around the neighborhood. Sam’s argument draws on Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. And tells you how to wander productively in the world… and within the structure of your stories. Sam presents case studies with audio and lays out a philosophy: Be a Pilgrim! A Radical Pedestrian! You’ll be convinced.”

The Amazing Radio Vertikalisator
https://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/feature/amazing-radio-vertikalisator
Inspired by a Lego time machine her son built, Iceland-based independent producer Rikke Houd created a tool to help producers take advantage of the vast space radio offers.
In this Conference session, Rikke demonstrates how thinking about your story as an exercise in time travel can add depth, perspective and pleasure to your work.

5 sound design tricks inspired by literature by Jeff Emtman
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/5-sound-design-tricks-inspired-by-literature“Before I began designing sound for podcasts, I assumed that there was a certain sorcery to it. There isn’t. In fact, I discovered that I already knew all the fundamentals—I had learned them in my high school english classes.”

Container Ship Karaoke
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002zky
This episode from BBC’s Between the Ears is a great example of building an experience of a place through field recording. “Nathaniel Mann joins lonely seafarers on a giant container ship for some modern sea shanties. No bottles of rum, but some heartbreaking ballads and deep water sounds.”

Ensayos – Hydrofeminist METitations Listening Series
https://www.newmuseum.org/pages/view/ensayos-1
As part of their digital residency at the New Museum, Ensayos practitioners will launch three podcasts. Drawing from Ensayos’s transdisciplinary work, these podcasts will focus on waters in different archipelagic regions, including Tierra del Fuego, New York, eastern Australia, and Norway. Journalist Catalina Jaramillo guides listeners through four acts that mirror different aspects of Ensayos’s field research: fiction, fact, somatic exercise, and care ethics. Each concludes with a song.

Get Lower – Jeremy Toussaint- Baptiste
https://muse-jhu-edu.libproxy.newschool.edu/pub/6/article/775530
Toussaint-Baptiste recounts moments in his life when bass, emanating from a parked car or carnival, has shaken his walls, tested his nerves, and made him feel connected to other people, whether or not he appreciates the music blasting from their subwoofers. Ranging from the soundtrack of his childhood in Baton Rouge to the sonic maelstrom of J’ouvert in Brooklyn, Toussaint-Baptiste describes bass as a means for marginalized people to make an impression on an insensitive world. He listens to chopped-and-screwed cumbia, Ariana Grande, laptop speakers, Nelly, the passage of bass through subway tunnels, and frequencies too low to hear.”

A Pause is not a Break – Jess Myers
https://www.htbdpodcast.com/apauseisnotabreak
“In architecture, we the practitioners of the built environment, have turned over our mode of communication so entirely to visual mediums, that we have been accused on many occasions of being poor listeners, poor readers, and perhaps, at the base of it, poor perceivers. What does the axonometric, the plan, the section, the elevation, the detail, the model miss? What have we failed to render in our visual pursuits?” 

Los Gritos de Mexico – Felix Blume
https://felixblume.com/losgritosdemexico/
After several years strolling Mexico City in an exercise of deep listening and recording the soundscape, Félix Blume has synthesized in this work a huge collection of cries in the capital of this country, creating a kind of “aural mirror” of the sociopolitical context on these days. The piece has recruited awards and been broadcasted by much of the world, listening to it requires an active attitude of the listener.

Jane’s Walk – Sarah Montague (starts at 4:44)
https://www.localswitchboard.nyc/podcast/2022/6/3/take-a-walk
Every year since 2009, the Municipal Art Society of New York has organized “Jane’s Walk,” a series of tours on the hoof honoring the urban activist Jane Jacobs. This year, Local Switchboard’s Sarah Montague joined several. 

John’s Podcast archive
https://portfolio.newschool.edu/sound/podcasts/
This is a collection of sound-focused podcasts on John’s sound resource site

Kits Beach Soundwalk – Hildegard Westerkamp
https://youtu.be/hg96nU6ltLk?si=OhB_ifJXxigJW9Tf
(1989) In the late seventies I produced and hosted a radio program on Vancouver Co-operative Radio called “Soundwalking”, in which I took the listener to different locations in and around the city and explored them acoustically. “Kits Beach Soundwalk” is a compositional extension of this original idea.

New York IPS – New York City 24 hours in Public Places
https://www.ubu.com/media/sound/tellus_11/Tellus-11_05-New-York-City-24-hours-in-Public.mp3
A sonic day in the life of New York, produced with more than a dozen radio producers living in NYC. An excerpt on the right is from a longer work that can be heared HERE.

Sounds of my City – Tony Schwartz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TesEGllSUgA
(1956) Sounds of My City: The Stories, Music and Sounds of the People of New York. Tracks in this sample: Introduction/City Street Sounds/People Sing, Dance and Pray.
Tony Schwartz was a highly influential media theorist, educator, media producer sound enthusiast. “His unusual but vital and influential career grew out of his passion for recording people and places, especially in his native New York. Though he suffered from agoraphobia, the prospect of exploring the sounds of the world outside kept pulling him out the door throughout his life.” – Library of Congress

Sounds from New York (Lincoln Center) – Tony Schwartz
https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2023/08/tony-schwartz
Tony Schwartz lived in an area known as “San Juan Hill” and “Lincoln Square,” which stretched from West 59th to West 65th Street between Amsterdam and West End Avenues. In the mid 1950’s there were plans to raze the neighborhood to build the cultural complex known today as Lincoln Center and there was spirited but doomed resistance from the neighborhood’s residents
With his microphone and tape recorder, Schwartz documented what he saw as a living and breathing community. What he found in Lincoln Square went far beyond gang wars and, in spite of the neighborhood’s reputation for violence and crowded, decaying tenements, Schwartz found it to be the home of a rich and varied community that included African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italians and others.
On September 23, 1962, the day before the first new building in Lincoln Center, Philharmonic Hall, opened, Schwartz broadcast a 15-minute collection of his Lincoln Square recordings on WBAI, reminding listeners in sound of what they could no longer see, and hoping that some of the culture that neighborhood once housed might find its way back there. (excerpted from Library of Congress)

Times3 (TIMES X TIMES X TIMES) – Pamela Z and Geoff Sobelle
“Take a walk in Times Square and hear a score crafted specifically for your experience. Or listen in the comfort of your home and imagine a city carved by countless hands from a place once thick with trees… which may be headed that way again. This music, created through impressions of a space, was composed for listeners to tune themselves to the forces underfoot, back in time, and down the road. It is a soundscape created for you to experience the city.” – Prototype Festival

You can read more about the project in this New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/arts/music/pamela-z-prototype-festival-music.html

Vanguard Estates
https://www.flashforwardpod.com/vanguard-interactive/
Welcome to the latest series from Flash Forward. The gist is simple: Welcome to Vanguard Estates is a choose your own path story. Each episode has a number, and a short title, and at the end of every episode you’ll be presented with a choice. All you have to do is click one and you’ll be on your way!

McSWEENEY’S 64: THE AUDIO ISSUE
https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/
Combining art, fiction, audio, and a slew of unclassifiable print objects in a custom box, McSweeney’s 64 is a riotous exploration of audiovisual storytelling, coproduced with Radiotopia from PRX (home to genius, independent audio creators including Song Exploder, Criminal, Ear Hustle, and more). Each piece in the issue establishes its own relationship between audio and print—the contributor’s unique experiment in weaving the mediums.

Included are Rion Amilcar Scott with a short fiction piece featuring two alternative audio endings; Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer Kate Soper with a transhumanist, interactive software upload; DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark on the limits of accessibility; Claudia Dey, Jason Reynolds, Renee Gladman, Sharon Mashihi, and more taking us on audio tours of our own homes; Aliya Pabani with a radio drama whose plot is complicated by a 24″ x 30″ illustrated poster; Ian Chillag with an absurdist, interactive phone tree; James T. Green, Catherine Lacey, and This American Life’s Sean Cole with voicemail dispatches to the editor; National Book Award-finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Aimee Bender, and Kelli Jo Ford with short stories that braid in audio; and so much more.

Bug Radio
https://bugradio.org/
BUG Radio is driven by a strong belief in the transformative power of radio as a public platform for artistic engagement and community building. By embracing radio as a tool for storytelling and cultural exchange, we aim to celebrate the diversity of voices within our community. Through our radio shows and collaborative projects with artists and musicians, we strive to create a space where everyone’s voice matters

Earlid
https://www.earlid.org/
Earlid is an invitation. It’s an online gallery of evolving exhibits of sound art. It’s like a museum. It’s also like a radio program with occasional practitioner interviews transformed by Earlid’s radiophilic curator. There’s a striving to educate and inform rather than criticize or interpret. 

Ears have Eyes
https://hibernationproject.ca/ears-have-eyes/
Named for the intersensorial experience of navigating wild spaces at night (when our ears prick like eyes squinting into the darkness) EARS HAVE EYES asks: what can the invisibility of sound illuminate? How does the intimacy of listening open our eyes to ideas we might otherwise overlook? What can sonorous spaces hold that physical spaces cannot? How do we look with our ears, and listen with our eyes?
….more info in the link.

The Hibernation Project
https://hibernationproject.ca/
The Hibernation Project is a domestic art intervention occurring annually from Winter to Spring. A tool for embracing – and combating – Winter in Canada, each weekend an open community of artists, musicians, and participants respond to a theme, installing work for the duration of one night. The project started in our house and yard in the Calgary/Mohkinstsis neighbourhood of Ramsay, and expanded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to include abstract locations spanning virtual, auditory, public, interstitial, and time-based spaces, leveraging analog technologies like radio and public amenities like parking lots as experimental venues for art.
….more info in the link.

The Lake
https://thelakeradio.com/
The Lake is a place for music and sounds. The radio stream runs at all hours of the day and is randomized. No one knows what The Lake plays next.

Montez Press Radio
https://radio.montezpress.com/
Montez Press Radio is an experimental broadcasting and performance platform. We were founded in 2018 with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio. This platform invites different corners of the art world to interact with each other in person and on air—a place where media finally meets flesh. We’re drawn to art that exists in the unexpected, the authenticity of sharing without a script, the sounds of ideas in the making, conversation that forgets there’s an audience. We also like books. All of our in-studio broadcasts are free and open to the public. Stop by when we’re live at 46 Canal Street #2 in NYC or look at the upcoming schedule to see if we’re off-site and broadcasting near you. Queries and programming proposals can be sent to radio@montezpress.com or message us on Instagram.

On Air – On Site
https://onaironsite.com/
On Air – On Site is a sound investigation of a temporary radio event consisting of a broadcast schedule of 48 hours of non-stop streaming, including live performances, fixed media, and radio artworks specifically composed for the festival by an international community of sound artists. The project explores the boundaries of being simultaneously on air in a physical and virtual space, challenging different radio formats.

Radiophrenia
https://radiophrenia.scot/
RADIOPHRENIA is a temporary art radio station broadcasting intermittently from the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.

The broadcast schedule includes newly commissioned radio works, Live-to-Air performances as well as live studio shows, screenings, shorts and pre-recorded feasures. The majority of the programme is made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works.

Radiophrenia first began broadcasting in April 2015 with subsequent editions in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2022. The websites from our previous festivals have been archived below.

Semi Silent
https://semisilent.ro/
Podcast platform for sound art, radio art and field recording
We started in 2016 with sound pieces using field recordings in podcasts for a Bucharest sound ecology: the exploration/recording/transformation/transmission of urban intimate memories.
….more info in the link.

Transom
https://transom.org/about/about-transom/
Transom channels new work, voices, and ideas into public media through the Internet and workshops. Our goal is to be useful and inspiring. Transom is a performance space, an open editorial session, an audition stage, a library, and a hangout. Our purpose is to pass the baton of mission and good practice in public media through tools, philosophy, and technique.

Ubuweb
https://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html
A treasure trove of sound experiments. While it is not limited to any particular genre it DOES focus on experimental sound works and includes radio and transmission, avant garde music, sound installations and more.

UK Radio Drama Festival
https://radiodramafestival.org.uk/
The festival aims to bring diverse work from across the world, introducing a UK audience to the European tradition of audio drama often anchored in soundscape whilst celebrating our own more text based tradition. The festival provides a UK audience with the rare pleasure of listening to audio drama in other languages, supported by English language translations of the script. The festival also brings together work from national broadcasters with that of emerging independent producers and is proud that the major prizes have largely been awarded to this exciting but lesser known work. Also this link to a 2023 playlist of works: https://soundcloud.com/radiodramafest/sets/awards-2023

Wave Farm
https://wavefarm.org
Wave Farm is an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. We cultivate creative practices in radio and support artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors.

Based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, Wave Farm is a media arts center, media platform, and arts service organization. Wave Farm offers interdisciplinary outdoor installations, residencies and fellowships, and a research library. We operate FM radio station WGXC and host many online radio channels. Wave Farm provides fiscal sponsorship, consultation, and grants to artists and organizations.

Examined Life: Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=k0HZaPkF6qE
Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor went for a walk and engaged in a terrific conversation about disability as not merely some physical status but largely a social status, and that is also true for so called “able-bodied” persons.

On Looking – A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation – Alexandra Horowitz
https://alexandrahorowitz.net/On-Looking
In this book in the author takes walks with people from different disciplines (typographer, architect, sound designer, etc) to explore their particular vantage point shapes their perception. (it all begins with her dog and her child) 

Wanderlust: A History of Walking – Rebecca Solnit
TNS library e-book [link here]
A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell’s Roses Drawing together many histories–of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores–Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking….

Ways of Seeing – John Berger
4 episode on seeing [link to the first one]
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.

Why Walking Helps us Think
https://portfolio.newschool.edu/sound/files/2023/12/Why-Walking-Helps-Us-Think-_-The-New-Yorker.pdf
“What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention….”