Artists are listed here in alphabetical order by first name. Playback schedule will be published on this page by August 30, 2026.

Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh
Palimpsest

Palimpsest is an electroacoustic portrait of the steel-working communities that forged America’s industrial might. By recording, processing, and recontextualizing sounds from landmark steel bridges and retired steel mill furnaces in Pittsburgh, the work invites listeners to contemplate the labor, history, and resilience that built the nation. This work connects the Rust Belt’s specific industrial legacy to the broader national experience, framing the Pritzker Pavilion not merely as a concert venue but as a resonance chamber for the beating heart of America.

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Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh is a Taiwanese-Australian composer currently based in the United States. Her music has been presented internationally at events including Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, Eavesdropping Symposium London, MoxSonic, SEAMUS National Conference, Tectonic Festival (Adelaide), ISCM World Music Days, International Rostrum of Composers, Pittsburgh Festival of New Music, MATA Festival, New York Electronic Music Festival, Sonic Matters Festival (Switzerland), Forum Wallis (Switzerland), Paysages|Composés (Grenoble), and MaerzMusik (Berlin). Some recent commissions include Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, ELISION Ensemble, Wien Modern, Lucerne Festival, Foundation Royaumont, and the Monash Performance Arts Centre. She has received support from APRA Art Music Fund, New Music USA, the Australian Cultural Fund, Creative Australia grants, the Tomayko Foundation in Pittsburgh, and the National Cultural and Arts Foundation (Taiwan). She was awarded the 2020 Monash International Women’s Day Composition Commission Prize, and the 2022 Beleura Composition Award as part of the Melbourne Prize. Annie completed doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a Master’s degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is currently an Associate Professor of composition and electronic music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.

Black Diamond (Hunter Diamond & Artie Black)
The Chicago Wind Map

The Chicago Wind Map, conceived and composed by Chicago saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond (Black Diamond), was created by superimposing the Millenium Park 24-channel speaker map over the neighborhood map of Chicago. Woodwind and brass players from each speaker-neighborhood intersection point were then invited to make recordings in their homes, which were then assembled and arranged by Black Diamond. The result is a quasi-interactive sonic “map” of Chicago’s deep roster of horn-playing musicians.

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Black Diamond thrives on the chemistry and compositions of saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond. A mutual admiration for the collaborative recordings of saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh led them to experiment with their two-tenor palette. It quickly became apparent that the variance in their tonal and artistic approaches created a captivating sense of balance. This balance has been explored and developed over albums, tours, and more than fifteen years of friendship.

Courtney Werner & Many Hands (David Henderson) 

Courtney Werner and David Henderson (Many Hands) bring the sound and spirit of Appalachian stringband festivals to Sonic Pavilion. Their piece builds off of recordings taken at Clifftop, a fiddle convention that brings together thousands of players in West Virginia each summer. The work celebrates “old time,” a uniquely American musical form that evolved from the blending of European and West African folk traditions as far back as 1736, and the vibrant and tight-knit regional folk music culture that keeps it alive today.

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Courtney Werner is a composer, fiddler, field recordist, and ecologist. Her melodic arrangements and textural improvisations probe layers of folk music, natural sounds, and noise folded within regional soundscapes. She traverses traditional and experimental forms to explore notions of place, natural and cultural history, deep ecology, and degradation. Her artistic practice converses with, and transcends the boundaries of, her scientific research in the realms of soundscape ecology, ecotoxicology, and wildlife conservation. A member of the experimental trio Magic Tuber Stringband and an itinerant free improvisor, Werner has released music on the labels Thrill Jockey, Feeding Tube, Notice Recordings, Scissor Tail, and Blue Hole. She has performed at Big Ears, Sound and Gravity, Nelsonville, Hopscotch and various other universities, DIY venues, churches, and abandoned railroad tunnels.

Many Hands (David Henderson) is a record collector, radio host, and ambient musician. His radio shows are as likely to pull transcendence from a piece recorded by an ambient musician in a studio last year, as one recorded by an ethnographer in an unknown accordionist’s kitchen decades ago. His work as an ambient musician carries these experiments forward; As Many Hands, Henderson manipulates folk music, synthesizers, and field recordings into ambient music that twitches, shimmers, and roars through the static.

Kikù Hibino & Traxman

Sound artist Kikù Hibino and footwork pioneer Traxman transform Chicago footwork into immersive spatial sound across the Pavilion’s 24-channel array—a sonic portrait of a city continually renewed through migration and creative exchange. The collaboration brings together footwork’s living tradition and the experimental practice of a Japanese-born immigrant artist, turning the Pavilion itself into a compositional instrument.

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Kikù Hibino is a Japanese-born, Chicago-based sound artist and composer working across multichannel installation, spatial sound, and experimental electronic music. Through voice, text, synthesized sound, and noise, he explores the interference between language and electronic sound, creating immersive sonic environments that examine perception and non-linear temporality. He is also the founder and director of Signal Noise, an independent platform for avant-garde sound and video art. Recent releases include Sky Trajectories (2024), Fell to Fern (2022), and Rococo ∞ Echomatter (Superpang, 2026), a collaborative album with Merzbow.

Traxman (Cornelius Ferguson) is a foundational figure in Chicago footwork and one of the longest-serving producers in Chicago house and footwork, with roots reaching back to the 1990s ghetto-house era on Dance Mania. A member of the Teklife crew and founder of Tekk DJz, he helped define the genre’s rhythmic language across releases on Planet Mu, Lit City Trax, and Teklife—including the acclaimed Da Mind of Traxman (Planet Mu, 2012). A prolific crate-digger, he remains a central architect of Chicago’s footwork sound.

Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson
Ecology for Strings

In Ecology for Strings, violist Whitney Johnson, cellist Lia Kohl, and violinist Macie Stewart compose recordings by beginner Chicago string players – ranging from age 5 to 54 –  to sketch a multi-channel web of relations. Listening to the sounds of new strings players in the iconic Pritzker Pavilion draws connective lines across time to these artists’ personal histories, the shifting organic/machinic environment of the city, and spirit of collaboration that makes the Chicago music community like no other.

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Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy.

M. Azevedo
1000-Footer

1000-Footer celebrates the tireless service of the thirteen mighty thousand-foot Lake freighters. Too large by far to navigate the locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, these thirteen titans will spend their entire service lives traversing the Great Lakes, hauling ore from the Minnesota iron fields to southern ports in Lake Michigan and Erie. The piece uses a mix of musical sounds and field recordings of the freighters that translate the paths of the ships into motion around the 24 channel Pritzker Pavilion sound system.

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M. Azevedo (b.1977) is a Providence, RI based composer, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on experiences at the outer edges of perception, in particular the liminal region between low frequency sound and felt vibration. They are best known for their ongoing work as Retribution Body, where they use custom subwoofer arrays to create site-specific works based on the architectural resonances of performance spaces. In addition to their music, they have designed award-winning recording studios and mastered over 2000 albums. They teach at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell where they are an Assistant Professor of Sound Recording Technology.

Sadie Woods
Oasis

Oasis is a site-specific, 24-channel sound installation examining playground culture and public space as living reservoirs of cultural memory, joy, and connection. In conversation with the Recreation Movement and its recognition of leisure and access to shared environments as essential to human flourishing, the work explores autonomous play, cultural continuity, and relational belonging—where joy and imagination are sustained through shared environments.

Drawing from field recordings of playgrounds, parks, and environmental sound, the composition traces how rituals, lived experiences, and cultural knowledge are retained and carried across generations. Distributed across twenty-four channels, these sonic fragments circulate throughout the installation to create an immersive listening ecology where memory, movement, and embodied experience converge.

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Sadie Woods (American) is an award-winning post-disciplinary artist, independent curator, and deejay whose practice spans public art, sound, performance, and social practice to explore cultural memory, preservation, liberatory movements, and immersive experiences. Through large-scale installations, spatial audio environments, transmission art, and site-responsive performances, she creates works that engage history, ecology, and community through storytelling, listening, and collective experience. Drawing upon archival research, ecological inquiry, and sonic experimentation, Woods develops place-based projects that examine the layered histories of the Americas through lived experiences while honoring artistic expressions of heritage and cultural lineage. Her public artworks include sculptural installations, sonic artworks, and site-responsive performances that create immersive experiences exploring the relationships between place, history, ecology, and cultural memory.

About Chicago’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion

Designed by Frank Gehry, and featuring a 120-foot proscenium of rippling stainless-steel ribbons, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion is a highly sought-after location in Chicago for a wide range of cultural acts. The Pavilion’s superstructure forms a steel lattice with an integrated overhead sound system covering the 95,000 square foot Great Lawn, providing music and sound experiences for over 10,000 individuals. This cutting-edge audio system, a pioneer of its category globally, was engineered to replicate the acoustic properties of an enclosed performance hall. It does this by evenly dispersing amplified sound throughout both the permanent seating area and the open grass, therefore simulating the phenomenon of reverberation. The trellis’s 60 loudspeakers are divided into 24 zones for playback, enabling the sounds to be imaged and moved along the entire surface of the trellis. The result is a “canopy of sound” composed as a fluid sonic architecture superimposed onto the Pritzker Pavilion site. These creations enlivened the Pavilion, engaging the ever-present ambulatory public with a surprising, dynamic, and immersive experience, somewhere between the focus of a live performance and the majesty of the surrounding cityscape.

About ESS

Experimental Sound Studio is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to artistic evolution and the creative exploration of sound. As an international hub for sonic experimentation, ESS nurtures artists, heralds new works, and builds a broad, supportive community of makers, enthusiasts, and creative partners through production, presentation, education, and preservation.

About the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events

The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) supports artists and cultural organizations, invests in the creative economy, and expands access and participation in the arts throughout Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. As a collaborative cultural presenter, arts funder, and advocate for creative workers, our programs and events serve Chicagoans and visitors of all ages and backgrounds, downtown and in diverse communities across our city — to strengthen and celebrate Chicago. DCASE produces some of the city’s most iconic festivals, markets, events, and exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Millennium Park, and in communities across the city — serving a local and global audience of 25 million people. The Department offers cultural grants and resources, manages public art, supports TV and film production and other creative industries, and permits special events throughout Chicago.

For details, visit Chicago.gov/DCASE and stay connected via their newsletters and social media.

About Millennium Park

Millennium Park is the #1 attraction in the Midwest and among the top 10 most-visited sites in the U.S. It is also the anchor of an urban cultural campus (Millennium Park Campus) that includes the Chicago Cultural Center, Maggie Daley Park and The Art Institute of Chicago. Millennium Park is located on Michigan Avenue, bordered by Randolph St. to the north, Columbus Dr. to the east and Monroe St. to the south. The Park is open daily from 6am to 11pm.

Plan your visit at MillenniumPark.org | Facebook @MillenniumParkChicago | Twitter & Instagram @Millennium_Park | Join the conversation with #MillenniumPark