This Saturday, September 19
1:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Experimental Sound Studio (ESS)
5925 N Ravenswood Ave, Chicago, IL 60660
$10 members / $20 non-members
The Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology presents Listening Out Loud, our inaugural celebration of acoustic ecology (a still-emerging, ecological, and interdisciplinary field of study and practice attentive to the relational processes always at play between sound, place, and culture) and our first benefit event: an afternoon of shared listening. Please come out to support listening across environments and cultures in the Midwest
Schedule
1:30 pm — Doors open.
2:00 pm — A soundwalk with other ears, with architect and fellow MSAE board member Hanbing Liang, and me, Eric Leonardson.
3:00 pm — Annual General Meeting
MSAE members are invited to join us online if they are unable to attend in person. This is a brief opportunity to learn what we have accomplished over the past year, and to discuss our shared future as a member.
Please register in advance so that you receive the link before the meeting begins: Register on Zoom
3:30 pm — A rare octophonic (8-channel surround) concert of three new and classic soundscape compositions: Talking Rain by Hildegard Westerkamp and What the Waters Told Me by Barry Truax. The concert begins with the Chicago premiere of a desperate gyre by renowned sound artist and scholar Christopher DeLaurenti, in person from Baltimore!
4:30 pm — Silent Auction
This is your opportunity to give back to the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and propel our efforts into the future. Acquire some unique pieces of art, cool electronics, records, books, and one-of-a-kind experiences!
I look forward to seeing you at ESS. And if you can’t attend in person, please visit MSAE’s website and become a member or donor. Thank you!
ESS has been just as central to this work. I helped get it started in 1986 with a group of young Chicago artists, led by Lou Mallozzi and his late wife Dawn with practically no money, but it was the only way any of us could get our hands on equipment as the digital audio revolution began. Lou and I later wrote about those years, and what made ESS special, in a chapter for the book Listen Up! (more in my post, Listen Up! Radio Art in the USA). ESS has grown since. It’s now run by a younger generation, who took the helm more than five years ago, and its continued strength as a small but vital center for programs, archives, education, and facilities is proof that its original mission still holds.
MSAE has been a central part of my life and work since I co-founded it in 2009, as a regional affiliate of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and, further back, in the lineage of the World Soundscape Project. At the root is a simple conviction: that listening, practiced together and with care, is itself a form of ecological and social awareness. That conviction is also what I teach in the Art and Technology / Sound Practices department at SAIC, where for nearly thirty years I’ve asked students to listen before they assume their eyes and their technology give the full story. It’s the same belief in social practice — that art is something we create with and for people — that I spoke about in Create With the People, and that I return to in Why Membership Matters in 2025. Your membership and support keep this listening community, and this way of listening, alive.