https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=672 In 1977, Raymond Murray Schafer developed the concept of “soundscape”, which was translated into French by “paysage sonore”. Even though Murray Schafer has not been the first to be interested in the sound environment, his conceptualisation has opened a whole field of research, soon adopted by acousticians, ethnologists, geographers, but also historians. Beyond the visual dimension attached to the geographical notion of landscape, Murray Schafer wonders why certain sound characteristics are attached to landscapes. Sounds are likely, as much as visual elements, to evoke a landscape, which the listener sometimes transcribes into images and words, thus feeding a whole regime of imagination based on his cultural background. The historian working on the times preceding the invention of sound recording depends on these transcriptions being made by the witnesses, which are also interpretations. This obliges him to consider them as clues to gain access to a certain cultural sensitivity on the receiving side as much as traces of the emitted sound itself. In this paper, we propose to study the references to the sounds of Lapland through a series of French travel stories published between 1840 and 1900. Based on sound categories defined by the researchers in this field, we will identify the various mentions related to the sounds picked up by travellers. We will then show how the selection of sounds and their memorization can be part of a cycle of the imaginary, in the sense that the philosopher Gilbert Simondon gives to this notion. Finally, we will show that beyond the categories previously mentioned sound is a vector of memories and reveries that indirectly mirror the condition of otherness in which the traveller, far from home, finds himself. Numéros en texte intégral Géographies et imaginaires Géographies et imaginaires fr mer., 01 oct. 2025 11:09:22 +0200 mer., 03 déc. 2025 10:56:32 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=672 0