A diverse collection of plants from around the world live together in the Boston Public Garden, embodying the ideals and contradictions of the United States. Heralded as the “first public botanical garden in the United States,” this historic site reflects a uniquely American paradox: the aspiration for multicultural democratic inclusivity juxtaposed with the tenants of colonialism. Nature is not left to thrive on its own terms but meticulously curated, shaped to conform to Victorian notions of beauty and order. jaden piblik is an electroacoustic soundwalk setting of the Haitian-Cantabrigian poet Jacques Fleury’s Haitian-Creole translation of the English-language poem “Treeness” by Jason Allen-Paisant. The work bridges languages and traditions, resonating with the complex, layered histories embodied in the Public Garden itself.

Before Before the arrival of European settlers, the area of Boston containing the Boston Commons and Botanical Gardens, was known as the Shawmut peninsula. This peninsula was a much smaller piece of land than Boston is now as the salt marshes and mud flats that surrounded it were eventually filled in to create modern Boston harbor. This area was home to the Massachusett people who dwelt in small, sea-sonal communities along the Charles river. The area that is now Boston Common was a lightly wooded area that served as a pasture for a heard of milk cows and was bordered by the Back bay to the West[1, 2]. The shore on the opposite side of the bay would have been a bit to the north as you looked out on this large bay and would have been much farther across. This filling in of land has created an ecosystem and sound environment that is radically different than what existed previously.

A Walk Into the Past is a sound walk that re-creates the sound environment that would have existed in the time before the arrival of the settlers. By researching the environment, including its topographical features as well as the plant and animal life that would have lived on the peninsula at the time, I hope to fill various parts of the space with different sounds including the sound of water feature and bird life along the shores of the bay to the west as well as the domestic and wild plant and animal life that would have occupied the wooded pastures of the peninsula itself. This walk is open ended so that it can be completed in as short or long a time as the listener would like. All of the sonic elements can be experienced in 35-40 minutes by following a designated path that makes a 1.5 km loop around the commons.

By using the Echoes platform, I am expanding on my prior experience creating sound hikes includes my series of live Songpath listening hikes that started with a McKnight visiting composer fellowship in 2010 for a series of hikes in the Minnesota State Parks and continued in Chicago and other locations. This experience also informed a series of speaker driven sound installations in the city of Chicago entitled O’re the Body, E’re the Land that use field recordings of prominent or interesting water features in convolution with sounds that reflect the important developments in synthetic and mechanical music that occurred in the city of Chicago. Echoes has allowed me to expand this experience into the world of augmented reality to create an experience that will be permanently tied to the Boston Common area.

This work began with its site, the Boston Public Garden. The Public Garden has been one of the most vital features of the city of Boston for generations and is deeply beloved by residents and visitors alike. We wanted to capture the spirit of one of the most enchanting times to visit the garden: in the early spring, as the tulips fill their manicured beds and the people of the city shake off their winter layers and return to this shared oasis. We were inspired by Charles W. Stevens’ 1901 article “The Boston Public Garden” which provides a rich history of the garden and a tour of its then-current features. The article contains a passage that beautifully captured the sense of the garden’s transition from winter
to spring and which became the touchstone for our work:

The first display of early spring is that of hyacinths and crocuses, which often show their beautiful colorings above the “sugar snows” of April. This might aptly be called ” a curtain raiser” for the grand transformation scene that is soon to follow, which, as the vernal season draws to a close, opens with the first grand display of tulips, when these awake from their long sleep and lift their heads in all their prismatic glories to the sun.

We are using four compositional elements to express this theme, which are mapped across eleven regions of the garden using the Echoes geolocated audio platform. The first three elements are field recordings made simultaneously in each of the compositional regions of the garden on a sunny weekend shortly after the tulips bloomed. The first of these are first order ambisonic sound recordings of activity in the garden. These recordings are heavily processed with reverberation and degradation effects to produce a sense of the place’s history, connecting the people in the recordings to a century and a half of Bostonians visiting their garden. Each is presented as a tracking binaural render from an ambisonic source, with the cardinal orientation of the recording preserved on playback.

Soundwalks can invite learning about a given space – its natural, cultural, or political history. They can guide us toward a deeper understanding of the sonic world around us. Soundwalks as invitations to play are a less common but equally rewarding exercise. As children we often looked at the world through the lens of play – sidewalk cracks invite us to avoid stepping on them under perilous threat; trees for climbing stand out amongst the rest; we determine which house hides the terrifying monster and walk on the other side of the street. However, examining the world around us through the lens of play is not something that most of us regularly do as adults. Our proposed soundwalk invites listeners to adopt a playful attitude toward their natural spaces and those around them. For fifteen minutes, as listeners slowly walk around the lake in the Boston Public Garden, we will create the space for a playful interaction with the world. Together, we will explore the positive psychological benefits of play and how a playful attitude affects us and colors our lived experiences. We will tell stories of designers who seek to create playful moments in daily life – designers such as Bernard DeKoven who spent his life inviting others to participate in what he called “the infinite playground.” Finally, by exploring some of the aesthetic elements of play (including agency, objectives, and imagination), we will create opportunities for playful attitudes towards nature, others, and ourselves.

The included audio sample is a rough example of how we plan to introduce playful experiences to the listener. Whimsical sound design, narration, and sound cues create a light-hearted atmosphere for the listener in the existing sonic space of the Boston Public Garden. Then, first asking the listener to reflect on the role of imagination in play, we initiate a scenario for interacting with the cracks in the sidewalk in a game-like way. As the listener walks through other areas of the park, we will use the natural and built environment as launching points for additional aspects of and encouragement for imaginative play.

Traces is a user-guided, geolocated soundwalk through Boston Common that reimagines how we experience public space via sound. Composed of electronically processed field recordings, environmental textures, found sounds, and musical fragments (both original and archival), Traces invites listeners to encounter this historic landscape not as passive observers but as active participants in the creation of a sonically recombinant place.¹

Boston Common—America’s oldest public park—is a deeply historic civic space. It is a palimpsest landscape, inscribed with centuries of human activity (protest, labor, commerce, agriculture, sport) as well as activity of the more-than-human world: plants, animals, and the elements. Its pathways bear the rhythms of generations, etched into the terrain by footsteps, wheels, rain, hooves, and time. Traces seeks to surface these layered histories not through direct narration, but through sound-inspired associations—memory, resonance, and imagination. The work offers a space in which listeners can attune to sensory input that is often overlooked—the invisible residue of stories that haunt familiar spaces.

Delivered via headphones and untethered from a set route, the audio score transforms the act of walking into a personal and poetic encounter with place. Rather than following a linear narrative, Traces offers a nonlinear, spherical experience—an immersive, ambient soundscape that is assembled and reassembled with each step and shift in attention. As listeners move through the Common, their shifting attention and physical movement create a recombinant experience—each encounter with the soundscape is a reassembly of layered histories, reshaped by presence and perception.¹

The piece weaves together multiple layers of processed field recordings captured over several visits to the Common. Familiar environmental sounds—wind through the trees, human voices, distant street traffic, buskers and birdsong—are electronically manipulated through techniques such as granular synthesis, spectral filtering, convolution reverb, and spatial mixing to create a dreamlike sonic fabric. These methods blur the boundary between real and imagined sound, inviting reflection on the histories—both collective and personal—that shape our experience of public space.

Rather than telling a single story, Traces invites the listener to become the storyteller. The composition acts as a frame, but meaning arises from within the listener’s own heart and mind. This shift from traditional authorship to co-creation allows Traces to function as a participatory form of place-making—one that acknowledges the multiplicity of histories and perspectives embedded in the land. In doing so, it offers a quiet resistance to fixed narratives and historical erasure.

In the private seclusion of headphones, participants are free to wander and listen, to slow down and reimagine their relationship with the Common. The work does not impose meaning, but gently draws attention to the sonic textures of a place often experienced primarily through sight. By encouraging a deeper form of listening, Traces transforms the Common into an acoustic field of memory and possibility, where echoes of the past intersect with the listener’s experience of the present moment.

Ultimately, Traces asks: What happens when we change the soundtrack of a place we think we know? And what might we discover if we listen in a new way? By offering sound as a conduit to the unseen contours of a public space, Traces opens up new ways of sensing, knowing, and belonging within a shared environment.

¹ The term recombinant is used here not in the sense of mash-up aesthetics or digital sampling common to remix culture, but in a phenomenological and spatial sense—invoking the listener’s real-time recomposition of meaning through embodied movement and situated listening. This aligns with site-specific sound practices and concepts of spatial assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), where place is understood as relational, contingent, and constantly remade through perception. Traces leverages this framework to produce a participatory acoustic ecology, where memory, history, and sensation coalesce in motion.

Nature, in its contemporary manifestation, is imperiled by humanity’s impactful actions. We value and depend on its life sustaining resources and ecosystems while we increasingly and hubristically destroy them in a tragic act of existential dissonance. In 2010 I began a multi-platform participatory art project called Wander, Wonder, Wilderness. It used images, sounds, and texts created in a mobile app to capture nature based experiences of visitors to Boston’s urban wilds and green spaces to ruminate and reflect on their integral value and purpose. The community based art project that resulted included voice and location recordings created by participants and uploaded to an online gallery, an interactive map that geolocated these contributions. The project lasted until 2016 and captured 1000’s of creative gestures testifying to the importance of green spaces in an urban environment as well as growing concerns about the looming climate crises. As we have progressed further down the path of resisting the reality of the Anthropocene in the last decade, these community experiences are expressions of their looming fears further realized. As we walk the paths they have travelled, we can listen across time and carry forward their desire to rectify our destructive path, and make difficult choices about our future direction. We can also consider, in their company, the symbiotic and intrinsic role that nature plays in our lives. Common Quantization Noise functions as an immersive and reflective opportunity to experience human voices and environmental sounds in harmony with our nurtured feelings about nature and resonating with our dissonant fears over its potential loss.

Whisper in a Lily’s Ear explores the concept of the poetic voice, and how this is intertwined with the voices of those who read their poems, demonstrating how we may hear the artistic voice of the poet that is present in their work. Boston in particular has a rich history of influential writers and artists, and poetry has played an important part of its creative culture: from rousing calls for independence to quiet musings on the everyday experience of life in the city, poems have helped residents from all walks of life to express and share their unique perspectives, serving as a metaphorical meeting place, much as the Public Garden also brings together a variety people, plants, and animals in a rich visual and sonic landscape. As participants walk through the garden, they enjoy the fusion of sight and sound, past and present, through the beauty of the garden and the eloquence of women poets who have found inspiration in the both the quiet sounds of nature and the bustling hum of a growing city.

The project is based on five poems written by female poets who lived/worked in Boston over the course of its history: Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911), Gertrude Hall (1863-1961), and Jadene Felina Stevens (1947-2013). Each poem is tied to a prominent monument or landmark within the Public Garden, over a walking path covering approximately a half-mile from its southeastern to the northwestern points. The experience of the soundwalk is mediated by the Echoes platform and is order-agnostic/listener-determined.. The sound files, with readings of each poem and accompanying data sonification, are activated by the listener’s proximity to each of the following landmarks:

— At the Wendell Phillips statue, a symbol of emancipation, is a poem by enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley on the topic of freedom: “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth.”
— At the Bagheera Fountain, which depicts a mountain lion reaching for an owl in flight, is a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper, “The Goal”.
— At the Triton Babies Fountain, symbolizing water, is a poem by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, “All the Rivers”, on the connection of the river to the sea.
— On the pedestrian bridge, spanning the pond, is an ode by Gertrude Hall to the beauty and strength of weeds, “To a Weed”.
— At the Ether Monument, celebrating the discovery of ether as an anesthetic, is a poem by Jadene Felina Stevens, “Garden Confidence”, on escaping pain through garden secrets.

In addition to recorded readings of each poem, sounds of the city have been used to create the data sonfication aspect of the piece. Two selections of modern-day sound recordings made in Boston accompany each poem, with varying pitches determined by word and letter frequency data.

The first sound repeats at pitches corresponding to the frequency of each word within the poet’s published collection containing that poem. I performed a word count within the collection for each word of the selected poem, ignoring all words with greater than 1,000 occurrences (thus avoiding common articles and conjunctions), then scaled the word counts to audible frequency values, greater than 20 Hz. Upon evaluating words placed in the inaudible range, above 20k Hz, I determined that uncommon words used by the poet are of more interest than high- occurrence words, and therefore also removed all words with greater than 150 occurrences, corresponding to my own audible hearing range of 15k Hz.

The second sound for each poem repeats at frequencies corresponding to the frequency of each word within the overall English language, based on letter frequency data compiled by the Oxford English Dictionary. I wrote a Python program to accept the text of each poem, divide it into words and then letters, and calculate each word’s frequency based on Oxford’s data. I again scaled the results to audible frequency values, and removed all words eliminated at local level.

The result is a dual series of sounds that accompany each poetry reading, weaving together the modern sounds of the city with poetry written throughout its history. The title of this soundwalk, taken Jadene Felina Stevens’ poem “Garden Confidence”, succinctly expresses the interwoven relationship of poetry, nature, and sound that I hope to capture through this piece. Gardens, including Boston’s Public Garden, are often appreciated for their visual beauty, yet in truth they are a full sensory experience, of which sound plays an important part. Likewise, the use of recorded sounds of the city are also what help to define the experience and bring us fully into the present moment. Poetry also is brought to life through the fusion of imagery and sound, touching our emotions in a way that can help us to recognize our current moment as part of a tapestry connecting us to others across space and time.

Bat walking is by necessity an active form of listening: When I’ve participated in bat walks, using my bat detector to make the animals’ calls audible, the other participants – often including young children – looked up in wonder whenever they heard a call, knowing a bat was about to flit by and would only be visible for a few moments. Bats don’t creep into, or come crashing into, your auditory attention.

This sound walk is designed to suggest the feeling of a bat survey on foot. Normally a nighttime activity done with ultrasonic detectors, Bats of the Public Garden can be experienced any time of day. Rather than an attempting to be “realistic,” the resulting soundscape will be layered, shifted, and processed to communicate the urgency, mystery, and musical rhythm that arises from the joint improvisation of animal and human rhythms. At various points, the sounds of the bats will be combined with sounds from other ephemeral occupants of the garden – frogs, crepuscular birds, amphibians, and fish – along with voices of mythical, imagined, and other-than-nonhuman beings.

This roughly half-mile sound walk should last around 15 minutes, but can be longer as desired. Listeners will start on the bridge over the lagoon looking north, then walk east towards the Swan Boats, turning left to follow the path around the northern part of the pond, with a diversion to loop around the Ether Monument.

River Listening is an interdisciplinary project that invites participants to explore the hidden acoustic ecologies of waterways through an immersive, technologically mediated listening experience. Drawing from a decade of hydrophone recordings and scientific research, this soundwalk transforms the site into a dynamic sonic environment that reveals the rich life beneath the water’s surface. Hydrophonic Discoveries is an immersive soundwalk that reflects on the project’s last decade of work and unveils the hidden acoustic ecologies of river ecosystems through cutting-edge underwater sound recording technologies. This interdisciplinary project transforms scientific research into an artistic experience, inviting participants to explore the soundscapes of global river systems. Drawing from over 300 hours of hydrophone recordings collected from global river systems, the soundwalk bridges art, science, and environmental awareness. The artistic outcomes from River Listening are central to our public engagement efforts, which include soundwalks and live-streaming hydrophone arrays. These artistic projects have contributed to the advancement of scientific recording techniques and ecoacoustic methods. The River Listening project has presented over 35 soundwalk projects on the Echoes platform since 2014 and was an early adopter of this platform.

Curated Cacophony emerges from a critical inquiry into the algorithmic shaping of urban soundscapes and its consequential effects on individual sonic agency. Drawing from foundational soundscape theory [3, 4] and contemporary analyses of digital surveillance and control [2, 5], this project employs a distinctive AI-assisted narrative approach to guide participants through Boston Common. The experience is structured as a co-creative dialogue between my own voice and a synthesized vocal clone, a method designed to expose and interrogate the pervasive, often opaque, influence of data-driven curation in our daily auditory lives.

The project’s narrative innovation lies in its dynamic, site-responsive delivery and its conceptualization of a co-creative human-AI partnership. Curated Cacophony uses geofencing to activate 2-3 minute narrative modules at seven key reflection zones within Boston Common. These modules are characterized by a dialogic structure: my pre-authored reflections are presented in direct interplay with an AI-synthesized vocal counterpart, which was trained on my vocal patterns. This AI persona embodies the algorithmic other. The co-creative aspect is realized primarily through this conceptual partnership and the distinct performative qualities of the synthesized voice; its presence and delivery, juxtaposed with my own, are designed to shape the listener’s reception of the narrative. This dynamic invites reflection on the nature of voice, agency, and algorithmic influence, making the perceived intelligence and subtle persuasive power of AI an audible and tangible component of the soundwalk, particularly as it addresses AI’s presence and utility in relation to nearby institutions such as the AMC Boston Common 19 or Park Street Church.

The soundwalk, covering approximately one mile and designed for a 30-minute duration, is experienced through participants’ own smartphones and headphones, remaking personal technology into a conduit for critical acoustic and conceptual exploration. Site-specific narrations are not written as authoritative statements, but as catalysts, allowing participants to reflect on themes such as consent in digitally saturated environments, the nuances of data privacy[1], and the very nature of their sonic fingerprint. While the narrative guides the experience, participants retain full autonomy to engage with or move beyond any reflection zone, a design choice that itself mirrors the subtle negotiations of agency within algorithmically curated spaces.

Curated Cacophony functions as an experiential critique and an artistic investigation into the ethics of AI-human collaboration and data-driven soundscapes. By embedding these critical dialogues within the familiar urban environment of Boston Common, the project attempts to cultivate a heightened awareness of the invisible algorithmic architectures shaping our perceptions. It ultimately questions whether AI systems, often implicated in sonic manipulation and diminishing user agency, can be utilized in ways that foster critical engagement, deepen our understanding of our sonic environments, and promote more intentional, self-aware listening practices in an increasingly model-driven world.

Ghosts of the Great Elm emerged from my fascination with trees as a community center point. Almost everyday I run through the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University which is a place that has brought me peace and tranquility among the trees. As someone who is also fascinated with Boston history and the beginnings of US independence, I always was interested in the role of elm trees like the Great Elm and the Liberty Tree as characters in historical moments. Although these trees have had huge impacts on the community and the country, their existence goes pretty unrecognized today. There are small tributes to their lives in public today that are hard to find in the spaces they once lived.

My goal for the audience is to discover how curious they are about discovering these locations after moving through the common and discovering these haunting stories from the past. As the sounds of the mob grow louder when the listener moves closer to the site of the Great Elm, my goal for the listener is to question the community’s participation in one of these public executions.

The term “sonder” has amassed thousands of likes, comments and shares across digital platforms. Posts often feature a white background with the definition pasted on top in clinical Courier New, or are colorful collages of dark building windows, streets full of people or crowded metro cars. Users from Tumblr to Reddit all seem touched by the term, writing poetry, fanfiction and discussing “sonder” extensively in comments. The word has been shared so widely it’s now completely devoid of context, and it’s impossible to know if its “fans” — for lack of a better word! — are aware of its origins. It’s almost certain that some people share “sonder” posts because they identify with the writings on it, without even considering the word itself. But if there are users who genuinely believe the word has been in use in English for longer than 10 years… That is harder to tell.

The word “sonder” is an example of constructed language. It was created by John Koenig in 2013, when it was posted to his blog “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”. The Tumblr account consisted of prose poetry written to “perfectly describe some of the most profound feelings human beings are capable of experiencing,” as a contemporary Bustle article put it. [1] Each post was accompanied by a neologism coined by Koenig. This was how “sonder” ended up on the internet, followed by a long paragraph of a definition. It has been synthesized in most posts to: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”.

Although it has long faded into the cheesy, — and, largely, into the 2010s pop culture scape — “sonder” clearly struck a chord with many. The #sonder on Tumblr still receives multiple posts a day, and “sonder” has become the name of Brent Faiyaz, Atu and Dpat’s neo soul musical project, and is also the namesake of a number of products, from mental health startups to video games to bike brands. Undeniably, the term is, as author John Green wrote, in his blurb of the Dictionary’s print form, a “new word […] that we need but do not yet have” [3]. And, although Koenig’s poetry doesn’t seem to ever have achieved the same notoriety as it did in the 2010s, the word has survived, often without any ties to him at all.

As a young teenager, I was an assiduous Tumblr user. I can’t say Koenig’s work ever captured me aesthetically, but the word “sonder” was — and still is! — everywhere. In the years since, I’ve often found myself thinking about it. Posts on the term usually mention the feeling of looking around, locking eyes with a stranger and realizing their individuality — and their similarity to you. This is a feeling I have always been able to relate to, and I brought into this project (largely without even realizing it!).

They’re All Talking translates Koenig’s definition into a soundwalk, merging it with language and the chronology of the city of Boston. As listeners walk around the pond, they will be taken through colonization and into the waves of immigration in New England through samples of languages typically spoken in those periods. Representing the peak of Irish immigration, for instance, are various snippets of spoken Irish Gaelic, while Cape Verdean immigrants appear as conversations, poetry and stories in Cape Verdean Creole. Research on Boston’sThey’re All Talking, 2025 ICMC ’25, June 8–14, 2025, Boston, U.S.A immigration history was conducted in order to accurately portray the different cultures that have participated in the city’s history. The main source for this timeline was Boston College’s project, Global Boston.

Audio samples of languages were collected from databases such as the online version of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures [5] and the UCLA Phonetics Archive [6], but were mostly sourced from social media posts and from volunteers who recorded themselves speaking their languages. Different levels of fluency and heritage speakers were highly encouraged. Although audio samples of some languages were harder to find than others, — especially Wampanoag, the Native American languages spoken in the Boston area, and any pidgin and creole languages — effort was made to equally include all languages and dialects. They’re All Talking aims to recognize the incredible language diversity in the Boston area. It also encourages non-fluency in others’ tongues, and the curiosity that comes with it. It represents the experience of hearing snippets here and there, while being unable to parse out the meaning of a conversation. A walk like this only allows you to clearly understand the languages you do speak, while being left with one very simple impression of every other conversation you hear. That everyone around is just like you — they’re talking, talking, talking.

The Magdalena River Basin, Colombia’s main fluvial artery, has long been a site of ecological richness and sociopolitical complexity. The introduction of non-native hippopotamuses by infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar in the 1980s has added an unforeseen layer to this complexity, connecting issues of drug- trafficking impact, environmental change, and the ways in which the Colombian government and local communities have learned to deal politically, socially, and culturally with a so-called invasive species. The increasing hippo population, now exceeding 160 individuals, indeed poses ecological challenges and symbolizes the enduring-and sometimes unexpected- impact of illicit activities on natural landscapes. Sound ethnography might offer a unique lens for exploring these
complexities, moving beyond visual and textual analyses to engage with the acoustic dimensions of human-non-human interactions.

This soundwalk is based on current anthropological research conducted by Alejandra Osejo (Rice University). This project examines the controversies among scientists, politicians, animal rights advocates, and various local communities regarding the unusual presence of hippopotamuses in a Colombian region along the Magdalena River Basin. Through a multisensory methodology,ethnography has documented the places inhabited by hippos and the complex relationships that have developed between them, humans, other nonhuman beings, and the ecologies they shape. This ethnographic study explores the diverse sonic experiences of hippos on the former lands of Hacienda Nápoles and follows their migratory route over the past 30 years to the Magdalena River. Given the semi- aquatic nature of these animals, and thanks to the collaboration with hydroacoustic biologist Daniel David-Gutiérrez, terrestrial and aquatic environments are integrated in the research.

The former lands of Hacienda Nápoles were significantly transformed after the death of Pablo Escobar. In 1992, the Colombian government expropriated the Hacienda. Of its 3,000 hectares, a fraction was designated as a medium-security prison, while another portion was assigned to families living on the banks and islands of the Magdalena River or who had been displaced by violence. The remaining area was given to a company to build a large amusement park, which began operating in 2007. As a result, the lakes Escobar created for his animals were divided between the amusement park and the lands allocated to farmers. Over the years, the hippos continued to reproduce and moved between the lakes that were part of the former Hacienda.

Ethnographic sound exploration has allowed us to detail the differences among hippos according to their habitat (Fig. 2). Within the amusement park, in the largest lake built by Escobar, resides a colony of approximately 60 free- roaming hippos. Other groups of hippos inhabit nearby lakes, located on lands given to rural families who share lakes, roads, and pastures with the hippos. Over time, the hippo population has continued to grow. Along this route, some of them have settled on large cattle ranches, many of which were also owned by Pablo Escobar, where they coexist with cows and buffalo. They have also extended their presence beyond the old Hacienda Nápoles, reaching the Cocorná-Río Claro River. However, the hippos apparently do not inhabit this area permanently; they use it more as a corridor to reach the main riverbed. Following this route, some hippos have reached La Isla del Silencio, located in the main channel of the Magdalena River, just across from the mouth of the Claro-Cocorná River. It is home to a colony of at least six hippos. This island, approximately 100 hectares in size, shelters them in the forests and ponds of its southern area. The hippos move between the island, the main channel of the river, and the mouth of the Bocas de Palagua canal.

Our collaboration has enabled us to explore the sonic medium through the creation of experimental sound and music pieces that aim to invoke a sense of immersion and perceptual engagement with the issue [1]. We also have explored the spatialization of sound and object-oriented audio as tools for creating and controlling soundscapes based on the region’s diverse subcategories of sound, while also modeling the complex interactions between humans, other species, and the environment [2]. Rather than offering definitive solutions -of which there are none- with these artistic projects we seek to create a perceptual space where ICMC ’25, June 8–14, 2025, Boston, U.S.A Román & Osejo listeners can experience the convergence of diverse voices and perspectives within a shared acoustic environment.

To convey some of the findings of the sound ethnographic research, we developed an interactive soundwalk titled “¡Hola Hipopótamo!” that transports listeners approximately 2,600 miles south from Boston to the Magdalena River Basin. Field recordings were conducted in situ from 2024 to 2025, capturing a diverse array of sounds including hippo vocalizations, ambient nature sounds, tourist interactions, local interviews, as well as a collection of media excerpts related to the hippos issue. These recordings were meticulously cataloged and tagged, then segmented into distinct categories for the creation of libraries. Many of the sounds were recorded in the Ambisonics format, which allows for immersive, three-dimensional spatial audio reproduction. This format captures sound not just from a single direction but from all around the microphones, allowing listeners to perceive spatial relationships between different sound sources. The soundwalk was then developed using the Echoes Creative Apps platform, which enables GPS-triggered audio zones that respond dynamically to the listener’s location.

The soundwalk is geographically organized along a curated path within Public Garden, using key landscape features—such as bodies of water, wooded areas, and open lawns—to mirror distinct zones along the Magdalena River Basin and their associated sonic identities shaped by the presence of hippos. The route is designed for non-linear navigation, with water serving as a unifying sonic element connecting the lagoon and fountains of the garden to the rivers, lakes, and wetlands of the basin. Participants begin near the Lagoon, where news clips and documentary-style audio introduce the heavily mediatized ecological and socio- political dimensions of the hippo phenomenon in Colombia. From there, the route continues toward the more open parts of the park to emulate Hacienda Nápoles and its surroundings, where hippos interact with tourists in a theme park setting, represented through layered sounds of tourists, water, and boats. The path then narrows and enters less trafficked trails, evoking rural towns where hippos coexist with human daily life, accompanied by motorbikes, children’s voices, and regional music. Moving further into quieter sections of the Garden, the landscape emulates Barú, a more agricultural region with sounds of buffalo and sparse human presence. The next segment, representing Estación Cocorná, features transient audio elements that suggest hippos merely passing through. The final destination of the walk leads to a secluded natural area, standing in for Isla del Silencio, where water, wind, and ambient natural textures dominate a near-silent listening zone, marking a contemplative end to the experience.

In addition to the raw recordings, two additional sonic layers were created. First, hippo vocalizations were processed through granular synthesis, symbolizing the fragmentation and potential disappearance of these animals. Second, time- stretching and reverb techniques were applied to the hippo vocalizations, to create elongated drone sounds, enveloping specific areas of the soundwalk and evoking a sense of temporal suspension. During the soundwalk, listeners are encouraged to explore different areas in an act of “hippolistening”, as they attempt to locate ‘hippo individuals’ through their vocalizations. Scattered around the lagoon in the Public Garden, hippo sounds -including grunts, honks, and snorts- will emerge unpredictably, mimicking the experience of encountering these animals in the wild.

Nature Walk is an audio walk comprised of three sections:

The Great Elm Remembers is a meditation on deep memory — both public and private. The Great Elm is no longer standing, yet it endures in our public memory. And for many — those still living and those now passed — it holds personal memories, some of which are woven with its public history. These memories have a power to connect us across time — to a moment, a people, or perhaps a person. In cultures native to this place, the songs of birds are sometimes heard as messages from the spirit world. It seemed fitting to place virtual flocks on this now phantom tree. Inhabiting its absence are sonic populations of local birds. At the tree’s core, these birds resonate wind chime bells to aid their messaging. These in turn resonate down through its roots — and its still-remembering rhizosphere.

Gibbons in The Garden
At the other end of this walk, is a tropical biome surrounding the Boston Public Garden Lagoon. There is a tradition at the Garden of planting tropical flora in the summer months. This stems from a Victorian era fascination with the Tropics. We extend that here with recordings of a 130 million year-old forest – among the oldest on earth – that I made in Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo) in the Fall of 2024. The recordings are set around the Lagoon. A small group of gibbons have broken free to join Sumatran cousins and sing throughout the Garden.

Ribosome Retune
To connect the above two biomes, I wanted to work at a smaller scale of nature, but in a way with significance for Boston. Musically, I was interested in spatial animation of harmonic tunings mirroring natural patterns and processes. I was drawn to Just Intonation (JI) for its clarity and richness of harmony that defies 12-TET categorizations of consonance and dissonance. This unmooring from 12-TET categorical intervals is abundant in the finer details of intervalic combinations and their relation to functional harmony. Does that 27/16 function as a brightly robust major 6th or is it a docile minor 7th, seeking resolution? This more nuanced psychological space is what I wanted to explore. But it’s a vast and chimeric domain. So I sought a natural architecture on which to structure this exploration. I chose gene expression for a couple of reasons. Our recent experience with the Covid-19 pandemic brought broad public awareness (and gratitude!) to the field of biochemistry in its rapid development of mRNA vaccines. Secondly, for this ICMC, it seemed a modest way to honor the enormous contributions to this field from across Boston’s great research institutions. Indeed, last year, Victor Ambros at Massachusetts General Hospital and Gary Ruvkun at Harvard Medical School were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on microRNA regulation of mRNA. But what is that? Might it offer a “natural architecture” on which to explore JI? This piece is that exploration – a personal adventure to learn about the fundamentals of gene expression voiced through spatial JI. It is an exploration, not an explication. That is, I wouldn’t claim today’s result is a brilliantly salient “sonification” of RNA transcription and translation. But I’ve tried to represent the biochemical qualities and processes coherently, and – as for any musical work – hopefully in ways that offer worthy listening.

Brainstorming with ChatGPT
This project was also an exploration into whether current AI’s are useful for creative brainstorming across multiple domains. This took the form of ongoing conversations over a period of months with ChatGPT. First this was to orient myself in the basics of RNA transcription and translation and the specific mechanism of gene silencing that Ambros and Ruvkun identified. With little biology education, it was very helpful to have “one on one” conversations with an expert, focusing where needed to fill in my understanding. This also afforded the opportunity to bring other topics into the discussion and brainstorm across potential isomorphisms. For Just Intonation, I was curious how an AI might understand the impact different N-limits. Would it address perceptual qualities as well as the intervals’ acoustic foundations? ChatGPT really impressed me here. After we achieved a solid context across RNA and JI, I explained that I wanted to create a sound piece in JI using our RNA processes. We got into properties of the nucleotide bases, their effects in coded (CDR) and uncoded (HTR) regions, the properties of amino acids: molecular weight, polarity, hydrophobicity, wobble, another characteristics. We discussed their expression harmonically and their behavior spatially, as well as use of secondary and tertiary structures in RNA translation to guide arrangement and animation of representing chords. I then asked for our model expressed in the formats that drive my software. This involved correcting and prodding, but it ultimately succeeded. The arc of brainstorming across obscure topics, towards particular artistic goals, and then producing data to manifest them in custom software is powerful. Working with such a creative partner that can reach in seemingly any direction with expertise is exciting indeed. I hope you enjoy the music.

Tandem Running derives its title from a collaborative navigation behavior observed in colony-building insects such as ants and termites, who are capable of passing knowledge to each other about their environment through social learning. The soundwalk represents the balance of growth and decay in nature and how these forces work concurrently even in human-planned spaces such as the Public Garden by specifically highlighting the role of insects and other invertebrates throughout the life cycles of the plants grown there. There is a focus on representing species which are often viewed as frightening or disgusting but whose ecological contributions are invaluable, such as pollinating wasps and invertebrate decomposers like worms and isopods.

The iNaturalist app was used to collect research-grade observations of invertebrates local to Boston. Representative species were selected from iNaturalist sightings submitted in or around the public garden, with the aim of striking an equal balance between species that contribute to pollination and those that contribute to decomposition. Each individual sonic area along the route features sounds that represent invertebrate life associated with the plants in that area. The specific organisms represented are katydids, lacewings, hoverflies, and mud dauber wasps, which are pollinators, and woodlice, worms, and carpenter ants, which aid in decomposing waste and plant matter.

Each area of the soundwalk is comprised of several audio layers, which represent their respective species with varying degrees of literality, using both digital synthesis and public-domain audio recordings. Katydids and wasps, for example, produce loud and characteristic noises that are easily repurposed into ambient beds or sampled to create melodic lines. Species like worms and ants require a more abstract approach, as they don’t produce recognizable sounds themselves but can be sonically represented through actions associated with them such as digging or chewing. Audio elements are layered to evolve in complexity as listeners move through each sonic area, progressing from ambient, sparse organic noises to denser musical loops.

Untitled Lagoon Ecologies marks the first in a series of site-specific multi-species compositions that activate a ‘living’ and creative bio-acoustic archive. The idea emerged from a collaborative dialogue between transmission artist and researcher Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and Wave Farm resident and Colombian-Swiss transmission artist and researcher Alejandro Duque. This ongoing initiative draws from a 2025 convening along with sound artist and curator Jorge Barco of the Museum of Modern Art Medellín (MAMM) in Colombia, where the group, along with an invited cohort of expert bio-acousticians, artists and curators, attempted to envision a distributed platform for archiving and composing with ecological soundscapes that reflect multi-species cohabitation. Renowned networked music composer Scot Gresham-Lancaster, founding member of The HUB and collaborator on the DARPA funded Data Stethoscope sonification project joins in through this iteration at ICMC, bringing his experience in performative, data-driven sound systems to bear on the composition of Untitled Lagoon Ecologies.

The project reframes field recordings and composition as political and ethical acts of listening. Untitled Lagoon Ecologies takes place along the Lagoon Path of Boston’s Public Garden, layering nocturnal underwater pond recordings with the echolocation calls of bats, and recordings of birds and other species endemic to the site. These sonic materials, once inaccessible to unaided human hearing, are made audible to foreground the ecological presence and communicative agency of species that modernity has rendered mute [4]. The project extends upon an orignally conceived conceptual framework of a Parliament of Non-Human Listeners, that reimagines acoustic space as a site of shared presence and agency among species. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s Parliament of Things, it proposes an expanded listening politic, in which the vocalizations of non-human species are treated not as ambient phenomena but as expressive acts worthy of recognition and response [3]. In the context of Untitled Lagoon Ecologies, this idea frames the Lagoon of Boston Public Garden, not just as a scenic urban site but as a multispecies chamber, where each call (bat, bird,insect, or aquatic) is a form of participation in a shared acoustic commons [6]. The project thus stages a listening assembly in which humans are no longer sole epistemic agents, but co-present with other listeners and sound-makers in the ecological fabric. The soundwalk proposes an acoustic parliament where the Lagoon becomes a convener of species, a resonant commons where humans are only one among many listeners. The work is grounded in the notion of acoustic biocracy, asking us to listen not just for information, but for presence, cohabitation, and memory [5]. The route map for the sound walk within the Boston Public Garden is along the Lagoon Path before and after it meets Charles Path, continuing until the Swan Boats pick-up point corresponding to a distance of 0.4 to 0.6 miles.

The composition integrates a curated set of labeled field recordings featuring species-specific acoustic signatures as multiple audio samples. Terrestrial and underwater recordings in the human audible and ultrasonic domain were obtained using Audiomoth and Hydromoth devices [2]. These devices were placed in the lagoon and overnight in the Boston Public Garden to record nocturnal species as well as the dawn chorus of birds. Using the open source Python based live coding toolkit Sardine along with SuperDirt (the Supercollider implementation of the Dirt sampler), a spatial organization and temporal structuring, as well as rhythmic structuring and live-coded manipulation of the samples is achieved to create an interactive, multi-layered sound environment [1]. Sounds are mapped to specific locations along the walk using the Echoes platform, allowing participants to experience a shifting acoustic field where species voices emerge, recede, and overlap, reconstructing the Lagoon as a living, spatialized archive of multi-species presence.