“We’re all used to consuming music, but a sound installation is distinct in some key ways,” says Alex Inglizian. He’s the technical director and chief engineer at Experimental Sound Studio, a Chicago nonprofit that calls itself a “hub for sonic experimentation.”
Since 2001, ESS has programmed sound installations for the Lincoln Park Conservatory’s Fern Room, and Inglizian describes them as a “long-form experiential thing that is built to enhance the feeling of an environment in the same way you might enhance an environment with lighting or paint color or objects. It’s a way to place sound in a space, almost architecturally.”
“Florasonic: Semblance of Fern,” created by Arkansas-based sound artist Sarah Belle Reid using electronic sounds generated by computers and synthesizers, is the Fern Room’s newest installation, and it can be experienced through Nov. 23. Roughly 30 minutes in length, it plays on a loop, beginning again at the top of every hour.
Visitors might wonder if the sound installation is even functioning properly at first. There are faint, crinkly sounds of static, as if someone were twisting a knob, trying to find a radio station on the dial. But eventually you realize, no, this is the sound installation, dotted with other sounds that grow louder but remain unobtrusive: popping, tapping, drops of water, buzzing, something akin to a ping-pong ball dropping and bouncing on the floor, or something else gushy being squeezed from a plastic packet. Then there’s a sound I can only describe as electronic farts. All of it layered, with no discernible pattern.
The overall effect conjures sounds one might associate with Hollywood’s version of robots — a world away from what your eyes are seeing in a greenhouse filled with ferns.
Will visitors find the sound installation challenging? Underwhelming? Confusing? It’s not meditative, exactly. But it’s not uninteresting, either. I tried to remain open to its possibilities and sat on a bench to take it all in. If you allow your imagination to wander as you gaze at the ferns, their leaves perhaps resemble the fingers of alien life forms. The sound installation gives the surroundings an eerie, futuristic feel, as if the greenery existed on an unfamiliar planet. That’s in contrast to the Victorian-era glass house of the conservatory itself and its permanent signage, which explains that some of the foliage therein has “been alive since before Chicago even existed” and that cycad plants in particular have “lived on Earth virtually unchanged for more than 200 million years.”
“An interesting aspect of the installation is that it’s a multi-channel installation,” Inglizian says, “which means that we’re used to hearing things in stereo — with two speakers — and this is four speakers, one in each corner. But each speaker is not playing the same sound. The artist can move the sound around the space so that there’s a dimensionality to it. If you’re walking through the space, you’ll hear a sound on the north end of the room and then hear it sort of swoosh above your head to the back of the room. So there’s a dimensional immersion aspect to it that’s a different way to consuming sound, and that really connects with the idea of sound as architecture.”
According to Inglizian, “We encourage the artists we curate for this to really try to understand why people go to the Fern Room and what they get out of it, in terms of the architecture and the plant life, and how can the sound we put in there support and enhance that?”
Reid, he said, visited last month and spent time in the Fern Room. “She brought some sound samples to test on our sound system to hear how they work in the space. But the most interesting thing, and the technological side of her piece, is that she collected environmental data from the Fern Room about humidity and temperature, and over time, she recorded the fluctuations. She’s used that information as part of her computer program to generate sounds.
“The main idea of her piece is that if you imagine the leaf of a standard fern, it’s like fractal geometry” — a never-ending pattern — “and she’s created this software that mimics the fractal geometry of these ferns to create sound. She’s creating what she’s calling ‘mutant ferns’ with her software, so the idea is that people will be there looking at a fern, or even touching a fern, and also hearing the fern. We experience a fern leaf with our other senses, so why can’t we do it with sound?”
Alas, none of that came through for me. And I suspect it will be too esoteric for the average person, as well. It’s a bit weird — but weird isn’t necessarily a negative.
There’s also an interesting tension at play. People deemed “too online” are often encouraged to metaphorically “touch grass” and commune with nature, and the Fern Room offers an opportunity for this kind of escape from technology. But Reid’s composition challenges that idea by filling the space with digital sounds.
“Digital technology has a lot of predictability and order to it,” says Inglizian, “whereas nature is the opposite in a lot of cases. I think what was inspiring to the artist about ferns is that they do have these very obvious mathematical structures that you can recreate with a computer. So what does it mean when we can mimic nature using computer software in a way where we find this symbiosis between order and chaos? Between nature and technology?”
Have visitors offered feedback over nearly 25 years of sound installations at the conservatory?
“People like to hear harmony, they don’t like to hear dissonance, or things that clash with what they’re used to hearing in the Western musical canon,” he acknowledges. “But most of the time, people come through and they’re like, ‘This is amazing, I’ve never heard anything like this before.’ So people really love it. But they’re also like, what is this?”
The sound installations that debut over the course of a year (usually it’s two or three) are not recycled, but are new commissions each time.
“Some of the artists have released them as records, so if you love the sound so much you can buy the CD and listen to it at home,” says Inglizian. ”But in general they’re very site-specific and ephemeral. It’s art for that space that you can’t experience anywhere else but that space.”
“Florasonic: Semblance of Fern,” composed by Sarah Belle Reid, will play at the top of every hour, 10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., through Nov. 23 inside the Lincoln Park Conservatory’s Fern Room, 2391 N. Stockton Dr. Registration to visit the Conservatory is required. Go to lincolnparkconservancy.org.