The urban+nature sonic pavilion was an immersive auditory exhibition that featured ten multichannel compositions by sound artists with the intent to engage audiences in listening beyond human-centric boundaries. Curated by Giovanni Aloi and Chris Hunter of the Antennae Project—an internationally respected peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of nature in contemporary art—in partnership with Experimental Sound Studio, this experience took place on Millennium Park’s Great Lawn, utilizing the Jay Pritzker Pavilion’s latticed speaker system. The exhibition was free and open to the public.

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Livy Snyder: Where did the project start? How did you first conceive of the urban+nature sonic pavilion?

Giovanni Aloi: It emerged out of nowhere one night in Logan Square, where we used to live. We would take lots of walks in the summer evening when it was warm. One night, a thunderstorm was hovering in the area, as we left the apartment. I heard a thunder and asked Chris if he heard anything strange. That thunder sounded like a roar that suddenly stopped and started—it had gaps. The experience was quite unsettling. The sound of thunder, which is this natural thing, all of a sudden glitched. It made me doubt reality. I started to think: “Hang on a second, is this a glitch in the matrix? Is that part of the simulation?” Maybe the software garbled it. But Chris had not even heard a thunder at all, which made the exchange even more surreal. Then, on the rest of the walk, we started to fantasize about a sound art project based on the ideas: what is real, what is artificial, what is natural, what is cultural, what is urban, what is nature? 

Chris Hunter: The thunder idea instantly made me think about the need for a large open air space like the Pritzker Pavilion. I imagined a sunny day where you’re just walking by and hearing thunder, giving people the same reaction Giovanni had.

It also made us reflect on the long-term focus we’ve had on the intersection of nature and the built environment, as well as the human and the non-human, through sound. Sound can be so fundamental and powerful in exploring these intersections in open, new, and non-hierarchical ways, yet it’s often overlooked in art compared to other mediums. And of course all of this was tied in with the ongoing interest, which Giovanni’s journal Antennae has been exploring since 2007.

We often exclude nature from our consideration in urban environments because we assume it’s absent, that is somewhere far away from the city. But if we listen, we can start to “hear the hidden” and re-examine the presence and viability of nature in these settings. It’s about reevaluating the sounds of the city, which, although often dismissed as noise, actually form a unique sonic tapestry. This project is about breaking down the traditional nature-culture dichotomy, making the experience both accessible and experimental, triggering the imagination.

LS: What a great origin story. I love hearing about the way thunder activated your auditory imagination and how you brought that experience to Millennium Park. I’m curious, how did you select the artists for this project? How do their approaches to sound contribute to sonic pavilion‘s exploration of human and non-human interconnection?

GA: The selection process turned out to be much more demanding than we initially envisioned because we received over one hundred and fifty submissions, which is the highest number ESS (Experimental Sound Studio) ever got for an open call. 

Chris and I wanted to embrace these pieces in a very open and unmediated way. We processed them as audio first: we would listen to the track, [and] wonder “what is it?” Just allow ourselves to encounter that audio piece first and then read the description. The pieces that stood out to us the most were the ones that really hit us on the grounds of their acoustic presence.

CH: I think the important component for us was that the selection process was an open call. We didn’t go [into the selection process by] hunting and pecking for any individuals, but we wanted to put this out there. We didn’t just put it out to artists or sound production people. We wanted a really broad range of responses to the brief that could bring a fresh take on discovering and exploring those dichotomies between the urban and the natural, and a way to maybe start subverting some of the hierarchies that culture has imposed on us in terms of how we confront or engage with our every day.

We didn’t know how long the artists had been making work or not. We didn’t look at any of that at the beginning. We did our sorting based on the power of the concepts. In the lineup, we had people in their seventies and others who were really at the beginning of their artistic journeys.

We also wanted to make sure that we leveraged the uniqueness of the Pritzker Pavilion sound system. Works were played over twenty-four channels. Part of the great thing about sound in the real world is that it is immersive. It’s three-dimensional. Where do you get a chance to put your work into a system as sophisticated as that and actually be dimensional in that regard with an immersive audience? I think that audience was a big part of our final criteria. Because we’re not sound artists in a professional sense, we were really concerned about accessibility to the audience. Oftentimes, when sound art is put into public places, it can be very mysterious or it can be very challenging. We love a challenge, and we love intrigue. But we were careful to make sure that there’s a thread that the audience could pick up on. A thread that would give them a question that they want an answer to, rather than posing something confusing that they weren’t interested in.

LS: One piece that stood out to me was Spaulder’s Awe/struck which explores a wilful unhearing of the birds dying from skyscrapers. How do the compositions in the sonic pavilion challenge existing modes of listening or conditioned listening? 

CH: The thought behind that piece is that we tend to look at these structures in the built environment, especially in these downtown centers, as marks of achievement and progress, beauty, and power. As the sun goes down, the lights come up in these buildings: It’s a magical show. We’ve all been there at the Pavilion when those lights come up; it’s a beautiful thing in the summertime. But there are also things we don’t see. One of those things is the body count of birds that strike those windows on a daily basis. How do you make the visually invisible, visible? Sound is a way. And in that regard, the Pavilion itself, the intimacy of its relationship carved out in the center of these canyons of buildings, starts to become a significant player in the effectiveness of a piece like that.

GA: In Chicago, The Bird Collision Monitor Group collects the dead birds very early every morning, at around three or four a.m. Imagine what it would be like if that group was not in operation and the street sweepers were not collecting the birds before we made our way into work downtown. Chicagoans would actually walk [and] trample hundreds of dead birds every morning. And the fact that this erasure takes place and that these birds are swept away or collected by the Collision Monitor is simultaneously good and bad. It keeps the city functioning, but the fact that we don’t see those deaths means that we don’t understand the gravity of the issue, the enormity of it. Sound can communicate that scale very quickly in an immediate way. 

CH: The piece represented a thirty-day period of migration from last year from September 23rd to October 23rd, 2023. It sonified the top twelve species that were killed during that period. The time period of the track was divided into seven-second intervals. Each seven seconds represented a day in that time period, and then each species in the top twelve, which represented only fifty percent of total bird strikes. Those top twelve species were each assigned to an instrumental voice or percussion voice. The artists created a key, a horizontal key for each species, with the number of hits they had to strike with that instrument sound in each seven-second duration over twenty or thirty intervals. And then those were layered together and then specialized across the system. And that’s why those sounds were what they were. But you may have noticed a crescendo during the piece: that would have been October 5th, which was a horrible day in Chicago bird migration history because over fifteen hundred birds in total died that day. At that point the sound intensifies and becomes such a blur you couldn’t even tell the distinctions in the track itself. But, it’s just a different way to take data, that’s once again abstract, assign it a character with an instrumental percussive voice, and then play it over a time period with the instruments of death (the skyscrapers) surrounding you.

LS: As Pauline Oliveros once wrote, “Listening is a process of developing from instantaneous survival reactions to ideas that drive consciousness. The listening process continues throughout one’s lifetime.” How does the sonic pavilion invite new types of listening? Or put another way, how does the pavilion encourage participants to engage with sound as a form of knowledge? Are there specific moments in the exhibition that you believe particularly evoke an alternative mode of knowing through listening?

GA: Your quote from Oliveros is so spot on for what the urban+nature sonic pavilion tried to accomplish. I think the idea of generating a different kind of listening awareness that mobilizes the listener to reconsider their position in space is something that we have thought about carefully in the context of the relationship we established with the visual world. 

So when you look at, for instance, a painting, a classical one, like the many that are at the Art Institute in the Renaissance wing especially, there’s always a use of central perspective, right? There’s one vanishing point in the middle, and those paintings situate your body almost instinctively at the center of the representation. Only by standing at the center can we gain the best vantage point, and that positioning in the middle, in front of the picture, is the epitome of a humanist framework that ultimately becomes anthropocentrism. It is an existentialist-philosophical proposition of dominion upon the universe. We are the center of the world, and the world exists because we view it with clarity from our privileged standpoint. We are the ones who make sense of it and order its apparent nonsense. Renaissance painting is a visual apparatus that situates the body in a position of superpower in relation to the more-than-human world. We began to transfer this idea to sound and noticed that the twenty-four channels of the Pavilion actually breaks that centrality, by creating twenty-four different perspective points. And that acoustic decentering is unsettling in a productive way so that you can read and experience the world afresh because you’re not quite sure what it is that you’re listening to.

Every artist we worked with dwelled on this speculative, decentering dimension. 

CH: In a sense, the stereo sound configuration is the equivalent of the central perspective in painting. It puts the listener at the center: a place of confidence and certainty. Sound serves your ears, an ear on the left and an ear on the right. Once again, a very human-centric way of listening. The concert hall is the epitome of that Renaissance central perspective.

Originally the sound system of The Pritzker Pavillion was designed to replicate the power and consistency of an indoor concert hall. We never really hear, however, the full expressive potential of the sound system during a classical performance because of this very reason. The 24 channels of the Pavilion are often used as a massive stereo system. Instead, our project capitalized on the decentering power of  24 channels that are specialized, which are never given an opportunity to show off that capability. There are three artists in particular that really stood out to us because their compositions greatly capitalized on this. Steve Riedel and Stacy Marquardt’s track Patch and Corridor greatly capitalized on the dynamic range offered by the 24 channels as did Gabi Kinlock’s 44.5B-Fps. 

GA: As a trans person of color, Gabi felt that sound could simultaneously reflect and map a journey of change and growth that would otherwise become interlocked into stereotypical representation of gender and race that prevent the articulation of certain complexities. 

There is something very important about the intimacy that sound can generate in breaking down stereotypes that prevent us from thinking about gender and race in new ways. Just the idea that the fluidity of sound can enable a non prescriptiveness of representation because it allows you to create areas of fading out and fading in that can be filled by the mind of the listener. Sounds provide opportunities to carve out accessible cultural spaces for diversity to exist and to be reconsidered.

CH: It’s interesting how sound has a way of letting us bathe in ambiguity in ways that we can kind of just accept rather than words or images. And I think that’s one of the powers of sound as a medium to kind of let us explore places or areas we normally wouldn’t think we were invited to or normally think we wouldn’t belong.

GA: The kind of deconstruction of the nature and culture dichotomy is grounded in Darwinist notions that the human is an animal. And if we follow the evolution of trails and we accept that we’re animals, then the concept of nature no longer makes any sense as a construct that separates us from other animals. Ultimately, at the core of the urban+nature sonic pavilion lies an existential baseline: the sounds we make become part of the natural, multi-species, continuous polyphony of life.

Audio excerpts of pieces from UNSP with an intro by the curators:

You can read more about the sonic pavilion and artist’s pieces here.

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