Where's My Wallet

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.

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.

Welcome to The Queer and Now, a geolocative audio tour of Northeastern’s LGBTQ history! In this experience, you’ll travel through time and listen to Northeastern students from throughout the decades recount their experiences. Hear interviews with former students, an overview of the time period by a historical expert, and even popular music from the period. Each group of echoes is placed in what was an important location during the students’ time on campus. To experience the full historical narrative, it’s recommended that you begin the experience in front of the YMCA building on Huntington Avenue, in the 1890’s echo, then follow the timeline. If you wish to jump around, or want to complete the experience in multiple pieces, simply click on each echo in the map, and the time period will pop up. Then navigate to the location of whichever echo you want to hear, and the audio will begin automatically.

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 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.

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.