WHAT SHOULD NATURE SOUND LIKE?: Techniques of engagement with nature sites and sonic preferences of Israeli visitors

•Tourists purify nature from civilisation’s sounds to differentiate touristic experience from their everyday.•Criticising noisy tourists is a class strategy of self-differentiation.•Tourist practices can be classified based on their different modes of engagement with nature.•Quiet is necessary for some modes of engagement with nature, but not for others.

Tourist experiences are not merely visual but multisensory. When considering the sounds of nature, tourists often have conflicting preferences regarding the appropriate and desired soundscape. The article explores these preferences and how they relate to different ways of engagement with nature, each having its own historical roots, agents and social meanings; each focused on different affordances of nature and demanding different prerequisites. Interviews with Israeli visitors of nature sites show that what they consider ‘noise’ depends on their social (class/ethnic) identification, but also on the mode of touristic engagement they employ. Thus, tourists who render themselves subject to nature’s therapeutic, aesthetic or spiritual influence have very different sensitivity to human-made sounds than those who consider nature a stage for social or physical activity.