FREE
Sound Scene is the Washington, DC, region’s premier interactive sound and multisensory arts festival. It’s a free all-ages celebration of sonic and sensory arts featuring artists from both DC and around the world.
General registration is recommended: https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1058085/
ONGOING PROJECTS
Face Value: Not Our Parents’ Mirror—Kameshia M. Hunter
Face Value: Not Our Parents’ Mirror is an immersive sound installation exploring the beauty rules that many Black and Brown women were taught to carry—and what it means to decide for yourself what you keep. Through touch, voice, and reflection, visitors move through inherited expectations as the body speaks, the mirror responds, and the final decision belongs to them. This work is part memory, part interruption, and part release. About the artist: sincerelymeeshproduction.com
Resource/Interplay—Matthew Maker
Resource/Interplay is an experiential work (auditory, tactile, visual, and participatory) that expresses the beauty of simple yet chaotic processes found in cold climates. The art invites audiences to intimately experience physical systems of melt and flow, gravity, light, and reflection. These abstractions distantly mirror ordinary experience, reminding us that even mud puddles have a complex and subtle beauty, and reminding us of the vast wonder of everyday life: a world and a climate to cherish as sacred. About the artist: mattarts.org
Sonic Inheritance—Cheyenne Hendrickson
Sonic Inheritance is a wearable organ sculpture containing seven internal tumors, each translating their genetic portrait into sound through field recordings, Geofón-captured movements, and contact-mic improvisations. Hendrickson is prone to developing tumors; her genes misspell her DNA the way she sometimes misspells words, shaping a new body, a mutation, a different language written into her. The work asks how we come to know our internal worlds, the parts that slip, gurgle, and work in silence, and whether what the body makes from within can be heard, felt, and held rather than feared. Try on the organ-body: hold it in your hands, place it over your head, and listen through your own body to what your inside sounds like. About the artist: cheyennehendrickson.com
Tree of Life—David Cardona, Álvaro Morales, and Anna Schwartz, a.k.a. Bloom Studio
Tree of Life is an interactive installation driven by a custom 10-foot treelike sculpture with embedded sound and lights. The sonics and lighting of the sculpture react to how participants navigate the installation space. Audiences are invited to explore collective expression through this centralized output of real-time music and lighting, building novel sensory experiences based on collaboration and collective interplay. About Bloom Studio: sound-architect.com; alvaro-morales.com and annajschwartz.com
The Future Memories Project—Chloe Smolarski and Tasha Darbes
The Future Memories Project is an art history slide cabinet that houses audio excerpts of climate memories and soundscapes that are activated as its drawers are opened. A speculative audio piece set in Washington, DC—sometime in the future—plays on a tape recorder, placing the viewer at the center of the experience. The audience, now interlocutors in the making of meaning, explores the drawers, mapping their own paths through an array of memories and layered, collaged soundscapes. About the artist: chloesmolarski.com
Together—Emily Sage
Together is a technology-based interactive sound art sculpture that celebrates the beauty of human connection and the importance of cultivating empathy for strangers. When participants join hands to bridge two larger-than-life figures, a chorus of voices can be heard—a joyful response to the simple, shared gesture of holding hands. This piece is an invitation not only to interact with art, but also to interact with each other. About the artist: emilysagemusic.com
Holding Still; Still Holding—Lyn Goeringer
Holding Still; Still Holding is an audiovisual diary that reflects on Superfund sites around Baltimore, Maryland. In the piece, composed of audio and video recordings taken at Superfund locations throughout the city, the artist contemplates their own personal connections to Superfund sites 1,700 miles away in Colorado and considers the reality of how remediation at these locations is less about fully recovering the land than making them economically viable. About the artist: lyngoeringer.com/portfolio/
WORKSHOPS
Please register for our free workshops (links in the entries below). Space is limited.
Tactile Sound Sculpture Workshop—Dan Ortiz Leizman
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 10:30 AM, 11:30 AM, and 1:30 PM
Register here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1057998/
Build your own sound sculpture with the DMV’s very own Dan Ortiz Leizman. Join a free 40-minute workshop in which participants of all ages will become contemporary sculptors. Using cardboard along with mini transducers, Ortiz Leizman will guide participants to position contact mics to capture voices and movement. Sound will be mirrored back as vibration, creating an accessible, hands-on exploration of embodied sound.
*Registration capped at 10 people per session.
*Children under 8 should be accompanied by an adult.
Immersive Sound Walk: Inaudible Cities: Here, Now, There, and Then—Jacek Tadeusz Smolicki
Sunday, May 3, at 11:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 3:30 PM
Register here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/e/1058087/
This free guided soundwalk will turn ordinary city infrastructure into the four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire. Equipped with special audio receivers, participants will follow an itinerary that is both carefully designed and open to spontaneous encounters. Water fountains, switchboards, ventilation shafts, sewers, and cobblestones will be processed in real time and transformed into sonic mirrors of the elements, their sounds gradually weaving into a composition that opens portals to fragile environments documented by Smolicki during their fieldwork in the Pacific West Coast, the Arctic Circle, the Canaveral Seashore, and other vulnerable landscapes.
*Duration: 35–40 minutes
*All ages welcome, Children under 12 require adult supervision and must be registered separately (to ensure there is enough equipment available for all).
PERFORMANCES
Reflections on Machaut: An Immersion by the DMV Regenerate! Orchestra—J. Clay Gonzalez, Wesley Hornpetrie, and the Regenerate! Orchestra
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 11 AM on the Plaza (outdoor stage)
The Regenerate! Orchestra will present an immersive reimagining of Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut. A 30-person orchestra will perform the first movement (“Kyrie”) as an antiphonal drone composition with found percussion elements. The alien, mesmerizing harmonies of the 14th-century ars nova style will smear out and spatialize, allowing the audience to physically inhabit and linger within a lost and beautiful musical language. About the artists: claygonzalez.com, www.wesleyhornpetrie.com
Duality—Wendel Patrick
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at noon on the Plaza (outdoor stage)
Wendel Patrick’s performance is an exploration of the relationship between himself and his twin brother, who did not survive birth, through manipulated sound, recorded spoken text, and auditory expression. Born Kevin Gift, Patrick uses the first and middle name of his twin brother, Wendel Patrick, in artistic performance. About the artist: wendelpatrick.com
still, life—slowdanger
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 1 PM on the Plaza (outdoor stage)
still, life is a durational performance trio who stage the body as a shifting sculptural instrument using chainmail, plexiglass, and embodied sound to expose multiple realities unfolding at once. As audiences navigate the Plaza, they will experience a live “distant mirror” in which material, architecture, and time echo and refract one another. About the artist: slowdangerslowdanger.com
Synth Rejection Therapy—Megan Hattie Stahl
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 2 PM on the Plaza (outdoor stage)
This sample-based modular synthesizer performance explores the universal experience of rejection. Recordings of crowdsourced rejection letters are looped, reversed, and manipulated until their words lose all meaning. The result is a collective processing and live transformation of difficult ideas into music and noise. About the artist: meganhattiestahl.com
Failed Future Bodies—Wednesday Kim and Dan Ortiz Leizman
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 3 PM in the Ring Auditorium (lower level, indoors)
Failed Future Bodies is an endurance performance in which two motion-captured performers attempt, and fail, to sustain a shared seated posture, their strained breathing through harmonicas forming a looping soundscape. A projected digital world mirrors their struggle, creating a painful and haunting reflection on rest, failure, and the unstable “wild west” terrain of our digital future. About the artists: wednesdaykim.xyz, danortizleizman.com
Plasticphonia—Plastic Trash Composed into Music / A Hymn Against Climate Change—Crystn Hunt Akron
Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 4 PM in the Ring Auditorium (lower level, indoors)
Plasticphonia is an interdisciplinary music project by Crystn Hunt Akron that transforms sounds from plastic waste into music tracks. Transforming environmental awareness into electronic club music, the project creates an immersive audiovisual live performance supported by multimedia artist TOFA’s 3D animations and sound-reactive visuals. This innovative work blends sustainability, media art, and club culture into a powerful, poetic experience.
Made possible with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum. About the artist: crystn-hunt-akron.com
About the DC Listening Lounge + Sound Scene
Sound Scene began in 2008 and is organized by the DC Listening Lounge audio arts collective in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Sound Scene is a free annual two-day public event. In 2024, Sound Scene broke attendance records for the Hirshhorn Museum, attracting more than 19,000 attendees over two days. Sound Scene celebrates sound through multisensory art installations, including sculptural and headphone-based and multichannel interactive exhibits. Our live stage features performances of dance, music, and spoken word. Sound Scene’s small-group workshops also invite audiences to explore acoustics, beat-making, sound production, sonic meditation, group improvisation, and more. Sound Scene features the creative work of artists from across the world.
Visit soundscene.org for more information.