The Queer and Now

I recorded this on a rainy day in Boston while walking from NEC to the Christian Science Center. The rain had just begun to fade, so the sound includes both rainfall and the quieter atmosphere afterward.

You realize you've lost your wallet at some point between last night and now. You were at a party last night, so you start your search at the host's, Claire's, apartment, on Columbus next to Ruggles Station.

This soundwalk traces a path from resonance to routine. Church bells emerge first at a distance, blurred by space, then become increasingly present as the listener moves closer. The walk continues into MUJI and Lady M on Newbury Street, where curated indoor sounds replace reverberation with intimacy and control. Moving between these spaces, the piece explores how sound shapes our perception of distance, atmosphere, and daily movement through the city.

imagine you are a pigeon, flying through a snowy afternoon, looking around at the people bundled up and the warm glow emanating from the row homes.

DESIRE PATH is a sonic walk by Kelly Chen to prompt a reimagining of mobility through interactions with vibrations. This geolocated audio tour is in conversation with themes of public/private, self/other, inside/outside, image/text, and other transgressed dichotomies presented in M’Kenzy Cannon: PLEASE LET ME IN at the Boston Center for the Arts. It explores the body’s relationship with city infrastructure with choreography and gesture. The sound walk combines elements of spoken “scores” and guided listening for the streets around Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, up Tremont Street, including interactions with Berkeley Community Garden and Peter’s Park. DESIRE PATH considers how silence, noise, and mobility function as social conditions by taking part in the sounds and motions produced by organic and industrial processes of South Boston. To plier over fences, saunter across curbs, and relever from pillars to the sounds of construction, cars, fountains, stop lights, and passersby, participants interpret the public dimensions of the space. What does the infrastructure allow you to do? How does it allow you to assemble? How doesn’t it? DESIRE PATH is created on Echos, available for mobile download on the App Store, Google Play, or the web. The walk will also be transcribed and mapped as a downloadable Google Maps coordinate set for accessibility. The walk can be performed in groups, or by oneself.

By : Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan

“Sonder” is an ancient viral hit — a 2010s neologism coined by John Koenig to describe “the realization that each [...] passerby is living a life as [...] complex as your own”. They’re All Talking repurposes Koenig’s now-cheesy term into a soundwalk, merging it with language and the chronology of Boston. Samples of Native American languages, English and the various languages spoken through waves of immigration are specifically tied to locations around the pond, building a linguistic timeline in the city. The incredible language diversity in the Boston area fuels a phone-in-pocket soundwalk that only allows eavesdropping on languages a listener speaks. The multilingual soundscape leaves one very simple impression of most of its conversations: that everyone, just like you, is talking, talking, talking. Presented at the ICMC 2025.

: This SoundWalk brings into hearing the fragile and often imperceptible bio-acoustic ecology of Boston’s Public Garden. This experience invites participants to attune their senses to the spectral presence of species that live here in the present and the past

Imagine the pond is a stormy sea. The closer you get, the more intense the gale becomes. Take cover behind monuments—listen to what speaks in their wake—and dare to glean what lies in the eye of the storm.