Toward an Auditory Turn in Public Cultural Services: Sound, Participation, and Public Value in the Digital Age

Abstract

Digital media have intensified the presence of sound in everyday cultural life. Podcasts, audiobooks, immersive audio, and participatory sound practices have diversified the ways in which publics encounter cultural content, experience space, construct memory, form affective connections, and participate in collective life. These developments invite renewed attention to the sensory assumptions underlying public cultural provision, particularly the enduring prominence of visual modes of exhibition, communication, and engagement.

This article develops the concept of an auditory turn in public cultural services to examine how sound may reshape cultural participation and the production of public value. Drawing on sound studies, auditory culture, media theory, and arts management, it approaches sound simultaneously as an aesthetic medium, an embodied mode of experience, and a form of social and cultural participation. Particular attention is given to the ways public sound practices generate meaning through listening, spatial experience, sonic narrative, cultural memory, and collective engagement.

The article proposes an analytical framework organized around three interconnected dimensions: aesthetic production, social function, and organizational practice. Through this framework, it considers how public cultural institutions curate auditory experience, engage communities, preserve and activate sonic memory, and coordinate relationships among institutions, artists, technologies, and publics. The concept of an auditory turn therefore extends beyond changes in media format or technological infrastructure to questions of sensory organization, institutional practice, and cultural participation. By bringing auditory culture into dialogue with research on public cultural services, this study seeks to advance a multisensory and socially responsive account of cultural provision in the digital age.