Emotion, Space and Society 42 (2022) 100867 Available online 23 December 2021 1755-4586/© 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Sonic methods, sonic affects 1. Introduction Researching with sound poses challenges to conventional research methods in the social sciences and humanities. This proposition is especially pertinent in cognate disciplines that tend to privilege the textual and visual, leading to the key problematic of how to communi- cate the emotional and affective qualities of sound through textual and visual media, as Susan Smith (1997, p. 504) once noted, ‘[w]riting about music is like dancing about architecture’. Making sense of ‘how sound operates, how it affects us’ (Smith, 1999, p. 22) entails the development, practice and processing of new methodologies and methods that help us craft a nuanced sensitivity to sound, one that acknowledges that the world is as much for listening to as it is for looking at (Smith, 1999; MacFarlane, 2020). Nascent scholarship on sonic geographies has lacked explicit meth- odological and methods-based advice on how to interpret sound criti- cally, how to actively engage with sound through research, and, how to disseminate ‘novel reverberations’ (Vannini, 2015, p. 12) of affective knowledges that centre around/on the sonic. Researchers interested in exploring and evoking sonic geographies have increasingly sought to develop methods and conceptual approaches, which extend tried-and-tested textual and visual methods such as interviews, to experiment with modes of listening and sensing, playback, performance, and creative means of communicating sonic affects (Birdsall, 2016; Doughty and Hansen, in press; Dodds, 2019; Harada, 2019; MacFarlane, 2020; Paterson, 2021; Wood et al., 2007, as well as the papers in this Virtual Special Issue (VSI)). As such, sound methods, in their privileging of the sonic throughout the research and dissemination process, often function differently, or complement, more commonly used forms of data such as text and images (Gallagher and Prior, 2014; Prior, 2017). How sound makes us feel, how we encounter it and its spatial and social affects, have been consistent thematics within the journal’s catalogue. Our intention here, then, is to spotlight on the ‘doing’ of sonic geographies, to not only create a ‘go-to’ catalogue that considers different applications of sonic methods, but to also cultivate new di- alogues about how sonic geographies can, and should, feature more prominently in our research practice. A key objective of assembling this VSI on Sonic Methods, Sonic Affects, has been to draw together schol- arship in the journal that has method at the core of its discussion of sonic geographies. In keeping with the journal’s mandate too, this focus on sonic methods frequently and unavoidably envelops discussions of sonic affect across a range of ‘emotional intersections between people and places’. We have selected articles from the last six years of the journal that have strong method-based discussion at their core, alongside a connected theme of sonic affect. The VSI addresses the need for a more detailed discussion of methods, including a range of overlapping and cross-resonating techniques of sonic mapping (Duffy et al., 2016; Ber- rens, 2016), modes of listening and sensing-oneself-listening (Gallagher, 2016; Dodds, 2019; Ratnam, 2019), approaches of ‘being-in-the-land- scape’ to immerse in a sounded geography (Doughty and Lagerqvist, 2016; Jones and Fairclough, 2016), including autobiographical and artistic means of expression, as well as considerations of performative sound-making, including a non-representational meditation on singing in the classroom (Lewkowich, 2020), the digital transmission of affect through online ASMR content (Smith and Snider, 2019), and collabo- rative artistic intervention into landscape as an outcome of sonic research (Patelli, 2017). Our co-authorship of the VSI’s editorial assembles our own research interests in sonic geographies, methods practice and the emotional af- fects of sound across diverse social and spatial landscapes. Through this editorial, and refecting a feminist position of writing and thinking-with experience and knowledge through and in our bodies, we relay between different pronouns through the editorial’s sections, giving credence to Militz et al.’s (2020, p. 430) contention that ‘different bodies have access to and experience research encounters differently’. Our use of auto-ethnographic vignettes – inserted at different stages through the editorial – embodies our attempts to weave theoretical knowledge production with bodily experience as we encounter the sonic prompts/memories that have infuenced our thoughts and subsequent written work. Echoing Drozdzewski and Webster’s (2021:3) recent assertion, ‘our situated knowledges, encompass the embodied and emplaced spatial locations from where we research and write, and embrace “refexive approaches to knowledge production” (Parker, 2021: 219)’. It is our hope that the editorial not only explicates the thematic connections between the VSI’s articles, but that it is also refective of the connective capacities of sound in and through collaborative writing and embodied experience too. Flanking the VSI articles, is a fourishing and lively scholarship in geography and related disciplines, one that is bolstered by the estab- lishment of sound studies as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Key av- enues of enquiry across these sound-related studies have investigated the role of sound, music and sonic media in understandings of self and other, in constructions and mediations of public and private environ- ments, and in the reciprocal affective and emotional relations between bodies, objects, places and ideas (see for example: Anderson et al., 2005; Bull, 2000; Connell and Gibson, 2004; Gallagher, 2011; Hudson, 2007; Mattless, 2005; Peters, 2018; Wissman, 2016). Sound, in its capacity to traverse the boundaries of the material and the social has offered ge- ographers a mode through which to focus on the relationality of socio-spatial everyday life as it is simultaneously structured by Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100867