Sound as Intangible Cultural Heritage: recalling sonic encounters

The term ‘cultural heritage’ is constantly evolving. As technologies develop and impact our human-environmental relationships, so too do our experiences and understanding of what it means to participate in, preserve and interpret cultural experiences. UNESCO emphasises that, ‘Cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. It also includes…oral traditions…social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe’.1 Many of these examples of cultural heritage can be categorised as ‘intangible’ – a fragile but significant category of cultural heritage whose importance lies not only in, ‘the cultural manifestation itself’, but also in ‘the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next’.


This chapter addresses, specifically, the role of sound within discourses on intangible cultural heritage, exploring the complexities of this particular type of cultural heritage in relation to its preservation for future generations. It addresses these questions primarily through an exploration of what is referred to in this paper as ‘the sonic encounter’: Drawing on examples of live music events, festivals, sonic aspects of heritage sites and contemporary art – including Ain Bailey’s Sonic Stories (2022) which explores the idea of the sonic autobiography and the role that sound plays in identity formation3 – it examines the significance of experiential context in relation to how these encounters are preserved, accessed and interpreted in the UK.


With reference to the British Library’s sound archive and a publication by J.I.Kidd, J.Medina and G.Pollhaus, it also asks questions about the extent to which there exists a prioritisation of material artefacts when it comes to the preservation of cultural heritage, whether this is unavoidable, and whether this nurtures what might be described as an epistemic injustice.4

1 https://ich.unesco.org/en/what-is-intangible-heritage-00003
2 Ibid.
3 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/lubaina-himid/sonic-encounters-exploring-collaborative-sound-art
4 The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice. ed. Kidd, J. I. , Medina, J. & Pollhaus, G.: Routledge, 2017.