This collaborative sound installation arose from the graduate seminar “Sound, Performance, and Land” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, co-taught by Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor Raven Chacon and Whitney Johnson.

My Ideal is Windy is a site-responsive installation inhabiting Lincoln Park Conservatory’s Fern Room. The work is brought to you by 2023 Alba Artist-In-Residence Dorothy Carlos.

Florasonic returns to the Lincoln Park Conservatory Fern Room with a newly commissioned installation by Kikù Hibino entitled fell to fern. Additionally, Kikù will perform a closing concert featuring Alex Inglizian on Sunday, October 16.

Walter Kitundu presents Careen, a composition arranged from a series of improvised scores performed by Douglas R. Ewart, in response to time-lapse imagery of ferns emerging from the soil, scaled to the plant ‘s sense of time.

For Florasonic, C. Lavender presents Terraforming a Sanctuary, a 4-channel sound installation that features the Lincoln Park Conservatory fern room as a place to assist visitors in finding a state of well-being.

For Florasonic, Anne Guthrie presents Hackle 2, an installation that connects with themes of transparency and hidden information.

bregne is a site-responsive installation inhabiting Lincoln Park’s Fern Room by Nomi Epstein. The work looks at the visual blooming process of ferns and uses the unfurling pattern as framework for instrumentation and environmental listening experience.

‘Mt. Shamao’ is a site-responsive installation by Milad Mozari and Mitsu Salmon as part of ESS’s Florasonic series at Lincoln Park Conservatory.

Set in the Fern Room of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory, Lakshmi Ramgopal’s installation A Half-Light Chorus features a ninety-minute, four-channel recording of vocalists imitating the calls of birds from India and Sanskrit literature. Punctuated with original Tamil odes to individual birds, this tapestry of arias, whistles, clicks, and cries plays with the diurnal rhythms, forms, and functions of birdsong.

A Grid Against The Sky aims to fill the interior volume of the Fern Room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, organizing the air molecules into evolving cross-hatched patterns.

 Sara Ludy's Climates is a soundscape inspired by changes in perception of sound while experiencing a feverish state.

Rob Mazurek's composition Psychotropic Electric Eel Dream IV in the Lincoln Park Conservatory Fern Room uses sounds generated by electric eels at the National Institute of Research and Technology in Manaus, Brazil.

What you'll hear in the Fern Room is Night Songs for the Birds of North America by JOSHUA DUMAS—a four-channel exploration of translation, memory, and mass extinction in the anthropocene.

In 'A Confounding Mimicry,' married collaborators Jenny Kendler & Brian Kirkbride employ field recordings, magical realism and synesthetic image-to-audio processing to present a seemingly straightforward nature recording that is anything but.

What you'll hear in the Fern Room is The Glass House by Chicago composer and percussionist Tim Daisy. The composition reflects various aspects of the structure of the building itself. It is recorded in four sections that play simultaneously, each supporting the other, much like the metal ribs of the four corners of the Fern Room support the overall structure. These musical sections are of different lengths, so they continuously mix and remix in surprising and unpredictable ways. The instruments, including vibraphone, cymbals, radio and turntables, recall both the materials of the building and its location in an increasingly technologized environment. The Glass House explores the sounds hidden within the Conservatory’s architecture and acknowledges its function as an urban home for botanical diversity.

If you look and listen closely in the Fern Room, you’ll notice some of the ferns trembling. This is Susurrati, an installation by Chicago artist Deborah Stratman with collaborator Rob Ray. Solenoids programmed at rhythmic intervals control the vibration patterns and add a faint tapping clatter, like an idiosyncratic Morse code. The Fern Room becomes a horto-fictional set, animated by selectively vibrating ferns. Plants turn into communicants that seem to whisper rumors about something unforeseen. If sound is “touch at a distance,” Susurrati is a composition of trembles.

What you'll hear in the Fern Room is Abeyance by Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg). Originally recorded in 2013, Abeyance has been reconfigured into a surround-sound installation that explores issues of spatial scale, temporal stasis, and the limits of awareness. Recordings of empty rooms—their near-silences magnified to reveal a hidden profusion of detail—are overlaid with one another and interwoven with the ambient sounds of the Fern Room to create a composition that, like the shifting light and atmosphere over the course of a day, unfolds almost imperceptibly in time. Subtle traces of electronics and distant piano melodies evoke indistinct presences and palpable absences.

What you'll hear in the Fern Room is Round the creep of the wave line by composers and musicians Boris Hauf and Keefe Jackson. For this collaboration, the composers considered the materials and elements in the Fern Room—soil, metal, glass and sunlight—in parallel to the materials and elements of the saxophones and clarinets they play—wood, metal, plastic and breath.

Since 2001, Experimental Sound Studio has been commissioning composers and artists to create sound pieces for the Fern Room through its unique Florasonic sound installation series. This year, we are revisiting some of the past projects with a nine-month retrospective. Each month, you can hear a different artist’s work enlivening the soundscape of the Fern Room.

What you'll hear in the Fern Room is Droopy, a composition by the Chicago duo Coppice (Noé Cuellar and Joseph Kramer). These musicians use acoustic and electronic instruments, with a focus on bellows instruments that are driven by airflow, such as accordion and pump organ. In Droopy, they concentrate on exhalation and the decay of breath to produce sounds that taper off in pitch and volume, recalling the drooping shapes of many of the plants in the Fern Room, and the heat and humidity that pervade it.

Orniphonia 2 is a four-channel sound installation featuring synthetic birdsong—each 'bird' being created by a simple electronic circuit. The fact that a circuit producing regular interacting patterns of change can mimic a living organism reflects the fact that all living things exhibit rhythmic behavior, and that all biological life interacts with its environment in a regular way.

Holzmusik is made from many layers of recordings of the clarinet, and each recording uses microphones placed very close to the instrument to capture its most subtle and delicate sounds. Through this “microscopic” approach to sound, the two-foot tube of the clarinet is magnified and re-imagined in the large space of the Fern Room.