‘And she flies! Beautiful’: the dislocating geography of football sound

Abstract

The overarching interest of this paper is in articulating the affective conditions of football’s play. It undertakes this through a consideration of the sonorous dimension of football, mapping its sounds across a framework borrowed from recent writings on sound-art and sonic geography. Specifically it considers a continuum articulated by Will Scrimshaw (in relation to sound art exploring spatial notions), between sounds-of-place and sound-as-a-place. It then places sounds produced in football-play across this continuum, to see whether football’s sonic practices can be more finely articulated through doing so, and might in turn shed light on its affective conditions.