Professor Rice's research focuses on the anthropology of sound and listening. He studies the ways in which sound is made, perceived and interpreted in different cultural contexts, and the impacts and effects it is considered to have. His work contributes to the Anthropology of Sound and the wider interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies. He is an ethnographer and has conducted substantial projects on sound in a variety of field sites, with a particular focus on institutions, including hospitals, prisons and zoos, though he has also carried out research on sound in other environments, for instance, a slum settlement in Delhi and a Romanian street-dog shelter. Professor Rice is also interested in the possibilities not only of writing about sound but also of working with and in sound through radio programmes and audio pieces, and he has made programmes for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. 

His book Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hearing-Hospital-Listening-Knowledge-Experience/dp/1907774246) is an ethnography of the auditory culture of a London hospital. It focuses on doctors' use of stethoscopic listening and other sound technologies in their diagnostic work, but also examines the techniques of listening used by nurses in their management of ward spaces and explores the ways in which the sounds of the hospital environment are woven into patients' experiences of hospitalisation. A further book, a cultural history of the stethoscope entitled Stethoscope: the making of a medical icon (co-authored with Anna Harris) was published in 2022 (https://www.waterstones.com/book/stethoscope/anna-harris/tom-rice/9781789146332).

Between 2018 and 2021 Professor Rice was PI on the ESRC funded Transforming Social Science project 'Listening to the Zoo'. This project aimed to generate detailed knowledge about how sounds are woven into the experience of zoos for visitors, staff, people who live near zoos and for zoo animals themselves. It set out to explore how listening, and attending to different kinds and qualities of sound, can promote new forms of awareness of human and animal behaviour in the zoo context. As part of the project he made an experimental listening tour of an imaginary zoo. You can access it here: https://soundcloud.com/user-102738989/listening-to-the-zoo-audio-guide.