ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the grid to document the social nature of the sound ambiance—it will help also to give an insight into the peculiar Cairo ambiances—and then a short presentation and some early results of the "mics in the ears" protocol and its contribution to the knowledge of the various social experiences of Cairo sound ambiances. Consequently, the main hypothesis is the existence of a social sound structure. To understand local ways of dealing with sound matter in the everyday life requires first being methodical, by setting up an ethnological analytic grid, and then by improving ethnological survey tools, as the main resistance to the study is to gather relevant verbalizations. This patchy and improvable grid is simply a tool to test the social readability of sound ambiances, through the competence, the form, the production, and the views expressed about the sound environment.
