Strange Tales of Davis Square

Sound on Mystic is an outdoor audio installation combining music, spoken word, sound art and ambience into an immersive experience. It is located along a two-mile stretch of the Mystic River in Medford and Arlington, Massachusetts, and is accessed through ECHOES, a free mobile app that uses GPS data to cue different sounds at various sites. Once you download the app, just put on a pair of headphones, take a walk within the installation’s extensive boundaries, and you'll hear a diverse set of sound works that are all united by the river itself, and its complex legacy as a place of history and nature, community and conflict, labor and recreation. *Access Instructions:* 1. Install the ECHOES app (the link is below, skip to step 3 if you've already found the walk in ECHOES) 2. Search for "Sound on Mystic" inside the app 3. Download the walk (this will function better than streaming the walk) 4. Close out other apps on your phone that access your location and may interfere with ECHOES 5. Go to the river and open the walk. You will see a map with areas highlighted in blue. As soon as you enter a highlighted area, sound will automatically begin to play. Depending on how fast you walk, some pieces will overlap with each other, or some pieces will play completely leaving a period of silence. Don't worry, that's all just part of the experience -- enjoy! Sound on Mystic is created by Ian Coss, Dwayne A Johnson, and Gary Roberts, with funding from the Medford Arts Council and Arlington Cultural Council, and support from the Mystic River Watershed Association. Contact us at soundonmystic@gmail.com.

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.

Soundwalk based on sound ethnographies from the Magdalena River Basin in Colombia, by Carlos G. Román (LSU) and Alejandra Osejo (Rice University).

This roughly 1/3-mile sound walk should last around 15 minutes, but can be longer as desired, and listeners may pause at any point of the walk, as all sound events are looped (except the last one). Listeners will start at the Ether Monument, following a path from there east towards the pond and then south along its bank. Listeners are invited to take this path as slowly as they like. The action picks up a bit on the bridge over the lagoon, then walk east to finish the walk at the Bagheera Fountain. 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 soundscape is 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.

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. Created by Dr Leah Barclay and Dr Toby Gifford for ICMC Boston 2025 www.riverlistening.com #RiverListening

MATTHEW AZEVEDO, University of Massachusetts, Lowell USA INGA CHINILINA, Brown University, Providence USA "Awake and lift their heads in all their prismatic glories" merges the invisible worlds of electromagnetic fields and seismic vibration with the auditory environment of the Boston Public Garden and composed score to create an immersive sound experience structured by the listener’s unique path through the work, evoking the yearly blossoming and renewal of the garden. The contours and title of the piece have been drawn from Charles W. Stevens’ article "The Boston Public Garden," published in the 1901 edition of New England Magazine, which provides the reader with a tour of the garden and history of the transformation of the “waste land” left when fire destroyed a series of rope walks into “a public exhibition of horticultural beauty such as can be seen in perhaps no other city of the Union.” Additional Performers: John Popham, Cello T.J. Borden, Cello

Tandem Running utilizes both synthesis and manipulated audio recordings to portray the involvement of invertebrates at every stage of plant life from pollination to decomposition. It specifically recognizes invertebrate species typically seen as scary and/or unappealing, such as wasps and worms, whose contributions to the ecosystem may go unappreciated, but are nonetheless critical for allowing human-planned natural spaces like the Boston Public Garden to thrive. Different species found in and around the Public Garden are represented both literally, with manipulated recordings of the sounds they make, and metaphorically, with melodic and rhythmic elements that become denser and more musical as points of interest along the route are approached.