To most people, the sound of Chicago is the bat cracking at Wrigley Field, children splashing along the lakefront or the L train rumbling overhead.
To Giovanni Aloi and Chris Hunter, the city sounds like that and much more. On Saturday afternoon on the Great Lawn of Millennium Park, the pair will present original compositions that mesh the urban environment with the natural one — a 90-minute soundscape that will transform wildlife sounds, from cicadas to birds, into aural compositions.
For the rest of the summer, in intermittent events and before some concerts, these original works will play through the Pritzker Pavilion’s elaborate speaker trellis that spans the lawn.
Titled “Urban+Nature Sonic Pavilion,” the 14 compositions come from an international list of sound artists, including some in Chicago. The contributors were asked to design something that would immerse park goers with sounds that make them rethink their own habitat as one that goes beyond concrete and skyscrapers.
“Our urban environment is filled with artificial sounds, yet there is a natural soundtrack that we tend not to acknowledge or maybe not recognize,” said Aloi. “We wanted to draw awareness to those two soundtracks which, when overlay each other, can bring you closer to the natural world which you may think does not exist within the urban one.”
The project was born from a partnership between the Chicago nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio and Antennae Project, which publishes a journal that is focused on “posthumanism,” a movement that “reconsiders the position of humans in the context of other inhabitants of this planet,” said Aloi, an art curator who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
That dynamic pulses through all 14 pieces, which range from two to seven minutes each. More than 150 people applied earlier in the year for a chance to design a soundscape that intersected the natural and human-crafted world; Hunter and Aloi ended up choosing people from as close as Humboldt Park to as far-flung regions as India, eastern Europe and England. What connected them all was their accessible approach to the project, they said.
Because the installation is in a public park, not an art gallery, the compositions needed to be short enough to captivate passersby and designed to captivate them spontaneously.
“We weren’t necessarily interested in pieces that took the opportunity to challenge listeners on the grounds of what sound art is and what it can do, but we wanted pieces that could transport and engage the listener,” Aloi said.
Said Hunter, “We didn’t want to fatigue an audience that is not accustomed to sound art but instead wanted to let them dip their toes into it and be open about it.”
While field recordings play a big role in many of the pieces, the composers also used music and studio enhancements to go beyond a documentary approach.
Beth Bradfish, a Michigan sound artist, intersected the sounds of cicadas, katydids, and crickets from Lincoln Park’s South Pond with a full orchestra.
The Logan Square-based collective Spaulder transformed data on bird collisions against downtown skyscrapers into audible tones and used them inside a percussive composition to bring attention to a continuing death toll invisible to most Chicagoans.
David Vélez, a U.K.-based artist, calls attention to the environmental degradation of the River Calder, England’s second most polluted river, through subterranean recordings.
“Everybody has their own take on it, but variety is something we’ve been going for so you’re not hearing the same approach more than once,” said Hunter.
For married collaborators Steve Reidell and Stacey Marquardt, the opportunity took them to 14 Chicago parks throughout the city in the spring to record sounds — birds and bugs in Jackson Park, musicians playing in Indian Boundary Park, ice cream truck bells in Humboldt Park as well as the thumping bass from cars in the parking lot — which they later fused together “into a natural orchestra,” said Reidell.
Each park “has its own character, whether it’s the languages people are speaking or activities those parks offer,” he said. “Patch and Corridor,” their composition, emerged to bring those differences together. Serving as the unifying park in the city’s park system, the Great Lawn serves as the natural home for the public to hear them at once.
The sounds “are things we hear every day and they become background noise,” he said. The sound exhibition at the downtown park creates a “pointed focus” for the listener to experience their city in a new way. The park’s 24-channel sound system created opportunities for them and others to create a rhythmic pulse from the source material, which can follow park goers as they walk across the lawn.
Apart from Saturday’s opening event, and a final event Aug. 15, the compositions will be played as the pre-show sound before eight regularly scheduled events at the pavilion between both dates. Each one will have a brief pre-recorded introduction “to give audiences a little context so they know what they are listening to so they can engage with it more readily,” said Hunter, who is also a creative marketing director.
Saturday’s opening will also have curated conversations with some of the artists on the pavilion’s stage. The curators also plan to post the compositions on the Antennae Project website, which the curators hope may even be used in classrooms.
“We really wanted to push it to a place of imagination that inspires people in different ways,” said Aloi.
