Curated Cacophony: Exploring AI's Sonic Footprint

Can you find where the Great Elm Tree of the Boston Common once stood and discover the ghost stories along the way?

Let your route be arbitrary. There is no particular place you need to be. Feel free to sit down and rest whenever you'd like. If you move through the Common in a non-goal oriented way, the score will stay with you and shift based upon the path you choose and wherever you end up. #### Traces (2025) A soundwalk for Boston Common *What happens when we change the soundtrack of a place we think we know?* Traces is a user-guided geolocated soundwalk through Boston Common that invites listeners to imagine the history of an iconic landscape through a radically altered composition of the park's sounds. A musical composition of electronically processed field recordings, found sounds and archival recordings are woven into a lush soundscape designed to deepen perception of this historic place. By shifting our attention from sight to sound, Traces offers a spherical experience of place, rather than a linear one: a layered sonic architecture where personal associations and echoes of history are omnidirectional. Rather than telling a fixed story, Traces amplifies quiet voices and ephemeral impressions, making the participant both witness and storyteller. In the private seclusion of headphones, listeners move through the park, free to wander and imagine—remapping The Common on their own terms. Traces offers us a chance to slow down, listen, and discover our own relationship to the unseen contours of a public space. Created and Produced by Christina Campanella Music composed and performed by Christina Campanella (field recording, sampling, keys, synth) and Mark Spencer (electric, baritone and bass guitars, pedal steel, kalimba, harmonica, percussion). .. -- .. ... ... -.-- --- ..- to live is to leave traces - walter benjamin .- -.. .- -.. -... . for elizabeth

For this hike, only choose 3D if you have head tracking headphones such as Apple Airpods with spatial audio. Otherwise, Choose 2D. A Walk Into the Past transports the listener back in time through sound within the boundaries of modern day Boston Common. Within this historic site, listeners can hear a sonic emulation of the sound environment that would have existed here nearly 400 years ago before English settlers arrived, including the bird, tree, insect, water features, and other wildlife that would have populated this area. Created using 3-dimensional audio, the walk provides a sonic experience of this ancient spot. As Boston harbor was filled in over the course of many years, the old "back bay" would have met the land right at the west edge of modern Boston Common where a dense salt marsh bordered the area between the land and the harbor.

**Nature Walk** is set in Boston Common and Public Garden. Enter or dwell at any point. It is in three sections: The **Great Elm Remembers** surrounds **The Great Elm** in Boston Common and 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** presents a tropical forest 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. Several recordings are set around the Lagoon. A small group of gibbons have broken free to sing throughout the Garden along with a few of their Sumatran cousins. Near the entrance on Charles St, one of the forest soundscapes is mixed with tones derived from a mRNA sequence that is the focus of the next section. Running between the above two biomes between Charles Street and The Great Elm is **Ribosome Retune**. The name is a play on the focus of this section - exploring Just Intonation on scaffolding of gene expression. This section of the walk dives into 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 Western tuning’s (12-Tone Equal Temperament) 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. 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 (2024), 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 scaffolding” 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 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. This section uses the coded section of the LIN-14 gene (that used in Ambros and Ruvkun's work) to generate tones from its bases and spin out chords of their coded amino acids using the amino acids' molecular weight, polarity, and charge to affect their chords' tones, size, spread, and rotation. The short LIN4 miRNA sequence enters above the walk and moderately stifles amino acid chords in its proximity. More information on the mRNA to Just Intonation mappings is found in their zones: "Ribosome Retune - LIN-14 Coding Region (CDR) Nucleotides and Amino Acids" and "Ribosome Retune - LIN-14 5' Untranslated Region (HTR)". The cover image is from ***Nature Walk***, by Teresa Parod. This painting is one of Teresa's garage door murals in Evanston, IL, USA. See @teresaparod (IG) or teresaparod.com for more work and a map to her ~100 public art works.

A collaboration with between Cantabridgian poet Jacques Fleury and Bostonian musician Rachel Devorah Wood Rome. 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 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. Rachel Devorah Wood Rome is an improvising electronic musician, educator, and labor organizer who machines for their patience and capacity to remember. She is employed as an Assistant Professor of Creative Coding at Berklee College of Music and as Vice President of Full-Time Faculty for MS1140 AFT Massachusetts. https://racheldevorah.studio/ Jacques Stanley Fleury is a Haitian-American Poet, Educator and author of four books. He has a degree in Liberal Arts and is pursuing graduate studies in the literary arts through Harvard University. His first book Sparks in the Dark: A Lighter Shade of Blue, A Poetic Memoir about life in Haiti and America was endorsed by the Boston Globe. Fleury is prominently featured in newspapers, anthologies, libraries and literary journals worldwide.Visit him at: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.

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

By : Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan

A data sonification piece 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. In addition to recorded readings of the poems, two selections of modern-day sound recordings made in Boston accompany each poem, with varying pitches determined by word and letter frequency data within each poet's body of work, and within the overall English language. Surrounding the monuments/poems, ambient music from each relevant time period plays in the background. 18th Century:"Sodgers Return", by Sturbridge Colonial Militia; Early-19th Century:"Home, Sweet Home (Folk-Song)" by Martin R. Lucas (Producer); Mid-19th Century: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" by Miff Mole And His Little Molars; Late-19th Century: "In a Blue Summer Garden" by Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, & Joe Shulman; 20th Century: "Crystalline Neurons" by PrimalHouseMusic. (All music in public domain/Creative Commons.)

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.