Abstract Cities are experienced in motion, yet urban soundscape research has largely assumed stationary viewpoints, overlooking the perceptual role of the walking perspective. Here, we show that this mismatch fundamentally blinds us to how walking views reshape urban soundscape perception. Using a within-subject, repeated-measures audiovisual design, 34 participants evaluated 18 urban streets under standing-view (SV) and walking-view (WV) conditions paired with identical binaural audio, providing both continuous real-time affective ratings and retrospective soundscape evaluations. We found that, first, rapid perceptual stabilisation occurred: taking the standing view as the baseline, real-time affective responses under the walking view initially diverged but consistently converged within the first 10 s across all participants and streets. Second, despite this early stabilisation, the walking perspective reshaped overall perceptual outcomes by selectively reweighting the salience of urban sounds. Among streets showing significant effects, transient sounds, including alarms and sirens, became more salient, whereas continuous background sounds, including traffic and human activity, became less salient. The walking perspective also polarised overall sound environmental evaluations, making positively evaluated streets more positive and negatively evaluated streets more negative, while reducing inter-individual variability. These findings demonstrate that the walking perspective is an active component of urban soundscape perception, shaping both the temporal dynamics of perceptual adaptation and the overall perceptual weighting of urban sound environments, with broader implications for understanding how environmental perception unfolds in motion.