Emerson Students, Faculty Create Sonic Strolls Through Time and Place

Visitors to the Boston Public Garden and Boston Common can now experience the city’s past, present, and future via augmented reality installations created, in part, by Emerson faculty and students.

Soundwalks, a collection of sonic experiences accessed through mobile phones, will be available in the Garden and Common indefinitely, but was introduced earlier in June during the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the largest gatherings of sound artists, electro-acoustic composers, and music technologists in the world. Emerson was one of several Boston institutions, including New England Conservatory, MIT, Berklee School of Music, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Northeastern University, to host the conference this year.

“The innovative technologies, genre-defying works, and fresh ideas presented at ICMC encourage us all to pursue new creative possibilities, develop ground-breaking partnerships, engage in unexpected collaborations, and expand accessibility — while inviting us to reflect on our responsibilities as creators,” said Visual and Media Arts Assistant Professor Amber Vistein, who was co-chair of installations for the conference.

During the June 8-14 conference, Emerson hosted five audio-visual concerts in the Bright Family Screening Room with the support and help of VMA Chair Shaun Clarke. Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury, and Exhibitions Manager Jim Manning, hosted nine immersive, interactive media installations in the Media Art Gallery. “The resulting exhibition was both stunning and more boisterous than average,” Vistein said.

As she was planning the conference, Vistein began to realize that Boston Common and the Public Garden, right outside Emerson’s front doors, presented great opportunities for artists to create pieces that work outside traditional venues like concert halls or galleries.

Soundwalks was developed in collaboration with Josh Kopeček, founder of ECHOES, a platform for creating and sharing immersive, geolocated AR audio experiences. Listeners in the Common or Garden can download the free ECHOES Explorer app and choose from a list of 17 soundwalks. GPS-tracking triggers changes and sound cues as the listener moves through the parks.

“This creates a unique and responsive sonic experience that is different each time, depending on where you start, how fast you move, and the path you choose to take,” Vistein said. “It is also a highly accessible artform — all you need is a smartphone and a pair of headphones.”

VMA Professor Paul Turano’s soundwalk, “Common Quantization Noise,” explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between humans and the natural world.

“’Common Quantization Noise’ function 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,” Turano writes in his artist statement.

Thomas Brady, a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Emerson, created “Ghosts of the Great Elm Tree,” a sonic exploration of the historical, social, and communal significance of the Great Elm, a tremendous tree, used at one time in hangings, that stood at the center of Boston Common from at least the 17th century until 1876, when it was felled by a storm.

“As someone who is … fascinated with Boston history and the beginnings of U.S. independence, I always was interested in the role of elm trees like the Great Elm and the Liberty Tree as characters in historical moments,” Brady wrote. “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.”

“They’re All Talking,” created by Media Arts Production major Lila Alonso Limongi ’26, presents a chronology of the City of Boston through the lens of language and identity, offering a sonic definition of John Koenig’s neologism, “sonder,” meaning “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

“As listeners walk around the [Public Garden] 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,” Limongi wrote. “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.”

Vistein said the Emerson curriculum lends itself to creative opportunities such as Soundwalks.

“The production curriculum at Emerson includes a robust roster of classes in immersive audio, sound recording, sound design, sound art, sound studies, and music production that train students in cutting-edge industry skills while asking them to reflect deeply on accessibility, ethics, aesthetics, and the creative possibilities of sonic storytelling,” Vistein said.