A Less Than Viral Relationship: The Irrelevance of Sound for Tourism Promotion

Introduction

It is not surprising to consider that societies are immensely reliable on visual processes. Videos, photos, cartoons, massive advertisement screens are simple examples of huge visualisation effects, reminding us that New York’s Time Square is probably only a metaphor of how spectacular and immersive communication is nowadays. This technical civilisation of the image has profoundly changed several social routines: “It is no longer for the stars that we look; today we look to the screens” (Virillo, 1980). The technological immersion into daily life is not fully implemented as society’s cultural dimension tends to be continually neglected into permanent shadows (Martins, 2011).

Comparing to image, sound is less viral. Social media, business companies and even the media discourse largely highlight “viral” with audiovisual content, videos or photos. Al-Rawi (2017) suggests that the emancipation of “viral” as a social phenomenon comes from advertising and marketing researchers who sought to explain the role of emotions for individuals exposed to high-profile events. In the media scope, “viral” is defined as the oversaturation of content, towards massive dissemination, consumption, “often achieved through globally networked digital platforms” (Artrip & Rebrix, 2018, p. 76).

Exclusively sound content is no contemporary buzzword. As a media content, audio is most likely to emerge as viral if it comes attached to a specific story and/or a personality. On May 9 2020, former US President Barack Obama had reportedly criticised Donald Trump’s policies to tackle down the Coronavirus outbreak: “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalised in our government”¹. The media fuzz used a private audio excerpt of Obama during a web talk with members of the Obama Alumni Association². However, we must acknowledge that Obama and its obvious political notoriousness were decisive for this audio to become viral.

Cultural experience is also affected by this technical and digital profusion (Eckstein, 2016). Tourism, as one of the areas where culture is at stake, is as an open market for the economic and symbolic barometer of countries and regions. For tourism promotion, visual elements are dominant, as well. The classical tourism image calls for eminently visual perceptions of sun, beach and sand, preferably in coastal areas (Gajraj, 1988). This means that the potential for tourism promotion is probably not yet fully explored. Hence, it may be safe to admit that “with the exception of music, which, due to its artistic, anthropological and cultural dimension, has always given rise to some important scientific compositions, sound as a semiotic material only seems to have acquired very recently some scientific “visibility” (Oliveira, Portela & Vicente, 2018). Regardless of this overwhelming visual experience, it is still possible to identify some experiences that use audio features of territories for touristic promotions. Public and private authorities have been able to use sound for these purposes, in the Thamel region of Nepal (Bhatta, 2016), Yellowknife, Canada (Braden, 2012) and in Sheffield, United Kingdom (Long, 2013).

This is the main core of this chapter: to determine possible extensions of sound for the promotion of places, according to a touristic point of view. In doing so, scientific literature should be able to give what has been published to wind down the audio as a reliable media feature for tourism.