1 Introduction

This chapter presents the volume’s purpose of providing a multimedia account of a ‘listening journey’ that the author has undertaken over the course of a year in order to gain more insight into everyday sounds, how we affect them, and how they―in turn―affect us. It emphasizes the importance of conceiving of everyday sounds as worthy of our attention, care, and receptivity, so that we can enact new patterns of engagement with these sounds.

We then turn to the first ‘diary entry’ recording the beginning of the author’s listening journey, with its accompanying audio file. Here, the author sets out further reasoning for questioning the everyday and finding the unfamiliar in the familiar.