2024 Soundwalk Series

Over the summer, guest artists engaged place-based interactive experiences. In these opportunities, artists and participants alike discover the sights, sounds, and moments, and unique character of neighborhoods in Chicago. These Soundwalks heightened multi-sensory awareness, fostered deep listening and new appreciation of urban and natural surroundings, and created connections that promote a sense of place and community belonging.

Five walks between June 23-September 14, 2024 below.

Our 2024 Soundwalk series was funded in part through a CityArts Program grant—thank you DCASE!

Singing Insect Soundwalk

Presented by Good City Group on September 14, 2024 at West Ridge Natural Park, Eric Leonardson prepares us for a Soundwalk through engaging “Ear Cleaning” exercises with directions from naturalist Negin Almassi.

The Singing Insects Monitoring Program is a citizen science effort to familiarize people with common sounds of singing insects in the Chicago region, including grasshoppers, cicadas, katydids, and crickets. Building on Dr. Carl Strang’s work documenting the many species within these four types across 22 counties, the purpose of the project is to collect local baseline data and help people keep their ears perked for unusual insect calls each summer. Data collected is publicly available to anyone who wishes to use it, and walks are conducted informally site by site along a route prescribed by a surveyor. Key to this is listening.

Negin Almassi, a local naturalist, teaches people how to identify insects by their song for the Singing Insects Monitoring Program, a community science effort involves recording songs of insects. She serves as the Resource Management Training Specialist for the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Negin also plays kamancheh, a spiked fiddle originating from Southwest Asia, in University of Chicago’s Middle East Music Ensemble.

Eric Leonardson, a Chicago-based audio artist, is co-founder and President of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and Vice-President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. He is a Professor Adjunct in Art and Technology/Sound Practices at SAIC. As a performer, composer, sound designer, and inventor, he performs internationally and promotes acoustic ecology, connecting communities through sound, listening, and the environment.

Meeting of the Waters, July 21 at River Park and Legion Parks

Meeting of the Waters was a guided soundwalk exploring the convergence of the built and natural environment. Participants listened to the sounds of the parks, pathways, and meeting points, using a geophone to explore sonic interactions—focusing on the confluence point and former dam area.

Participants were invited to listen to the confluence point using a geophone, offering an invitation to extend perception beyond the audible—to sense the vibrations and hear the hum of the river through the dam’s railing.

Documented experiences contribute to a live audio map—an evolving archive of sounds along pathways connecting to the Peterson-Ridge Metra area. This map, created from this and other walks, will continue to grow with new contributions. You can submit your recordings and experiences here.

Jeanette Dominguez is a Tejana living in the Midwest who is passionate about sound. She loves going on walks, listening for the everyday interplay of harmonies and textures in the built and natural environment. She also loves experiencing sound in community with others. Whether mixing on film sets, or collaborating in teaching artist partnerships with Free Spirit Media and Hear Below Soundwalks, collaboration fuels her creative drive.

Listening to the Air, July 15, 2024 at West Ridge Natural Park

The air where sound travels also carries scents and signals from plants, insects, and other animals alongside human-induced emissions. On this multisensory Soundwalk, walkers were guided by Lindsey French and Alex Young through a series of activities and scores, bringing silent qualities of air into our sonic space to tune their senses to the atmosphere as a shared and multi-species commons.

The Soundwalk drew from the Olfactory Media Library, a growing archive of tools and materials designed for experimental interpretation of, and performances in response to, our shared airspaces. The Olfactory Media Library is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

Lindsey French (they/she) is an artist, educator and writer whose work engages multisensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. Lindsey earned a BA from Hampshire College in 2010, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies in 2013 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They currently live in Treaty 4 in Regina, Saskatchewan and teach in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.

Alex Young is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose research-based practice examines ruderal ecologies, systems, species, and spaces as well as forms of human and other-than-human co-creation. They currently reside in Pittsburgh, PA where they are the Media Manager for Video & Media Design in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University.

HEAR HERE: Experimental Listening in Emmerson Park, July 13, 2024

Led by interdisciplinary sound artist Sam Anthem, this Soundwalk challenged our traditional habits of spatial and temporal listening. We used and experimented with recording technology to capture and experience the auditory landscape from different vantage points and moments in time. By listening and re-listening throughout the Soundwalk, walkers become uniquely intimate with the subtle changes of sound over time.

Sam Anthem is an interdisciplinary sound, performance, and media artist who seeks to illuminate, turn upside down, and animate naturalized status quos. Weaving conceptual threads across archives, bodies, species, and sociality, their work addresses knowledge systems and material relationships through sonic, technological, and performative encounters.

Reverberation, June 23, 2024, Peterson/Ridge Metra Station

This walk was an homage to Gaston Bachelard who was born 140 years ago, on June 27th, 1884. Bachelard has inspired the spatial awareness of many artists, architects, urban planners and wanderers. Participants were invited to join Odile Compagnon to embrace the new Peterson-Ridge Metra Station as a theater of poetic imagination and surrounding sounds re-activate memories long forgotten and open unknown sensorial fields.

Odile Compagnon is a licensed, practicing architect and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Walking these same routes regularly by herself and with friends and friends of friends has sustained her imagination for designs and lesson plans.

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Peterson Metra Interactive Walks