ICMC 2025

ICMC 2025

The Soundwalks track of ICMC 2025 received 31 submissions from sound artists and composers across five countries, marking an exciting expansion of the conference into site-specific, locative audio experiences. ICMC 2025 partnered with the Echoes platform to enable participants to create immersive soundwalks in Boston's historic Public Garden and Common, transforming these iconic green spaces into canvases for sonic storytelling.

We accepted 18 soundwalks that exemplify the spirit of "Curiosity, Play, Innovation" by reimagining how audiences experience computer music beyond traditional venues. These works invite listeners to become active participants, exploring layered histories, hidden narratives, and ecological soundscapes through GPS-triggered audio that responds to their physical movement through space.

The selected soundwalks demonstrate remarkable creativity in their engagement with place. Some artists excavate forgotten histories and commemorate untold stories, while others create playful interactions between the virtual and physical environment, turning a simple walk into a journey of sonic discovery. Artists, both local and international, rose to the unique challenges of composing for outdoor spaces where birdsong, wind, and urban life become part of the compositional palette.

We thank the 18 reviewers who evaluated these pioneering works, considering not only their artistic vision but also their innovative use of mobile technology and sensitivity to site-specific contexts.

Available throughout the conference via smartphone, these soundwalks invite us to reconsider the very boundaries of the concert hall and explore computer music as an embodied, ambulatory art form.

Nature Walk

Boston

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.

free