Resonant Landscapes

About

Resonant Landscapes is a sound walk for a phone and headphones. In fall 2023 I traveled to all 13 of South Dakota’s state parks and recorded each one with an ambisonic microphone. Its eight capsules capture the whole sphere of sound, above and below as well as all around. You hear hundreds of geese on a frozen lake, the ice at Oakwood Lakes moaning and cracking, prairie dogs, cars at Custer, a jet passing over, our footsteps in the snow. Some parks were crowded and some felt remote, and the recordings keep both the people and the wide open space.

The recordings sit at listening spots laid out like a map of the parks, scaled down to fit wherever the walk is installed. A trip that took us months takes an afternoon. As you get closer to a spot, its recording gets louder. At the center you can turn on rotation and face a sound by turning your body, the way you would in the park.

There is no set route. You decide where to walk, how long to stand and which way to face. The recording plays over the place you’re standing in, so you hear both at once. Frauke Behrendt calls this hybrid space. I find it makes me notice the sounds around me more, even after the headphones come off, because I start to wonder whether a sound is coming from the recording or from where I’m standing.

The piece comes out of Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundwalks of the 1970s and Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, with a smartphone doing what her portable players did. I built the app to run in a web browser, so there’s nothing to install. It isn’t tied to one place. It has been walked at Dakota State University and in Milan in 2024, in Terrace Park in Sioux Falls, and at Chatham University in 2026, its most built-up site so far. Each site changes what the piece means. The same recordings also became the surround-sound piece Veins of the Earth.

Video documentation

Installation at Chatham University, 2026

The gallery station in Sound+ Installations.

Exhibitions

• Dakota State University Research Symposium, 2024
• Audio Mostly Conference, Milan, Italy, September 18 - 20, 2024
• Sound+ Installations, Susan Bergman Gurrentz ’56 Art Gallery, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, October 5 - November 22, 2026