Sound Scene 2024: Solstice

FREE

Registration recommended.

Saturday, June 22, 10 AM–11 PM ; Sunday, June 23, 10 AM–5 PM.

What is Sound Scene?

Sound Scene is the Washington, D.C. region’s premier, interactive sound and multi-sensory arts festival.

It is a free, all-ages celebration of sonic and sensory arts featuring artists from Washington, D.C. and around the world.

Since 2007, Sound Scene has been curated and produced by the DC Listening Lounge. It is presented in partnership with the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

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Sound Scene 2024: Solstice

What does balance sound like? What is illuminated by sunlight? What finds peace in darkness? Celebrate summer solstice with 50 artists from around the globe and enjoy extended Hirshhorn evening programming on the longest days of the year!

Sound Scene invites audiences to engage with the “Solstice” through:

• Interactive audio art installations
• Small group workshops
• Live performances

This festival is free and open to the public; registration optional but encouraged.

Sound Scene is all ages, all free, all welcome! ASL interpretation available on-site all day.

Want more?
Stay late with special extended museum and festival hours until 11 pm. This year, Sound Scene will partner with the European Union to host a special event, State of the Arts Night x Sound Scene, from 5 – 11 pm in conjunction with the Smithsonian’s Solstice Saturday. Don’t miss a one-night only evening of cross-cultural inspiration, bringing together artists from across the European Union in creative conversation with artists from the Sound Scene Audio Festival to explore the connective power of sound.

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Workshops have limited capacity. Secure your spot by registering in advance with the links below.

• Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
• close| distant
• Expanding Ground
• Pulses

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Featured Projects

Across the Open Spaces (Performance), KHORIKOS
KHORIKOS’ forthcoming album, “Across the Open Spaces”, is a collection of unaccompanied vocal music that explores distance and darkness and confronts loneliness. Conceptualized as an immersive experience, the ensemble recorded their album by standing in a circle around a 360° ambisonic microphone. KHORIKOS will perform selections from the album in different spatial arrangements, inviting the audience to change their own listening positions in between pieces and move around freely encouraging hearing from different perspectives.

 

Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores (Workshop), Travis Johns
Over this 1-hour workshop, participants will build a small, stand-alone electronic musical instrument powered by alternative sources of energy. Ever thought about holding your own backyard solar rave? Now’s your chance.

 

Clear Channel (Performance), Awad Bilal, Don Godwin, Mary Regalado
Clear Channel, a Washington, DC-based trio featuring Awad Bilal (Too Free), Mary Regalado (Downtown Boys, Gauche) and Don Godwin (Too Free, Tonal Park) emerge as a force of joy. They are an eclectic mix of artists and activists fusing funky post-punk with humor, bouncy bass lines, and celebratory rhythms. Described as “making party music on the brink of psychic annihilation” by the Washington Post, Clear Channel is distinctly DC and glowing.

 

close|  distant (Workshop), Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz
Join artist Heike Kaltenbrunner to explore the sonic possibilities of sound and space through the unique pipes of close| distant. During this 20 minute workshop and performance participants (no musical experience required) are invited to transform into instrumentalists. With guidance from Kaltenbrunner, activate soft tones and sculpt fffrrrrs, hums, and hisses to orchestrate an original and collaborative soundscape. Kaltenbrunner will offer tips to participants to help them hone in on steady hand movements and more playful gestures to bring forward unique drones and timbres.

 

Dance of the Planets, Alex Wand
Dance of the Planets is solar system sonification by Alex Wand and Desert Magic. It began as a live performance piece that maps orbital speed to tempo and planetary position to stereo image. In collaboration with coder Luke Williams and designer Stephanie Layton, we then developed the piece into an interactive application with options to activate, deactivate, and randomize planet rotation to create soundscapes that unfold differently every time. We have a tradition of performing this piece on the solstices, inviting listeners to attune to the interweaving rhythms of celestial motions and earthly seasons that are orchestrated by the sun.

 

Echoes of an Ancient Sun (Interactive installation), MJ Alexander, Edward Knight, Kiegan Ryan
1,200 years ago, 1,200 miles west of here, a powerful cultural center flourished amid ceremonial mounds built to align with the sunsets of solstice. Echoes of an Ancient Sun is an interactive GPS-powered experience featuring on-site field recordings and evocative soundscapes inspired by the history and mysteries of Oklahoma’s Spiro Mounds.

 

Epitaph of the Earth (Interactive installation), Shinnosuke Komiya
Epitaph of the Earth is an instrument that transforms rocks’ unique characteristics into enchanting melodies, offering a new perspective on geologic time. This creation changes how we interact with the earth’s ancient elements, turning the simple act of collecting rocks into an adventure through the deep, untold stories of our planet’s past.

 

Expanding Ground (Performance), Althea Rao, Layla Klinger
Expanding Ground is a durational performance in which participants take turns using their bodies to weave ground patterns to form a large-scale lace work over the course of one day. As thread-bearing human bodies interlace in acts of complex entwining, we reflect on singularity versus multiplicity, involved in the production of knowledge and dynamic social relations.

 

Infinity In Our Hands  (Interactive installation), Kristine Diekman, Lisa Mansfield, Liz Waugh McManus
The Sun is a dynamic star, a constantly changing hearth of light and heat providing life on Earth. In 5 million years the Sun will start to die, expanding and losing energy. Working with scientific data gathered from the Chandra Observatory—NASA’s flagship mission for X-Ray astronomy—and other sources, the project explores the lifecycle of stars through sound, touch and light. It includes speculative fiction, star sonifications, field recordings and glass renditions of astral data, to provide an experience of the interconnectedness of stars with human life.
Voice performers: Finley Stapleton-Hamilton, Kristine Diekman, Sally Broatch, and Nick Rheinberger.
With thanks to project partners: Nicolas Bonne (Tactile Universe), James Trayford (STRAUSS), the Smithsonian Institution, and Craig James.

 

Karnatik Music’s Celestial Compositions (Installation), Balakrishnan Raghavan, Alex Wand
This work features a vocal recording of seven 18th-century songs from South India that describe the celestial planetary compositions of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. With 3 different entry points, you can choose your preferred way to experience these aural worlds and be mindful of the planetary life world we inhabit.

 

Longest Day / Longest Night  (Interactive installation), Peter Green, Carolyn Zaldivar Snow
Longest Day / Longest Night is a practice in collective memory and digital preservation recalling sounds from historical solstice dates unknowingly cataloged in smartphone videos and public archives. This interactive installation invites museum visitors to pick up a telephone and dial an extension from a geographic location labeled switchboard, and listen to sounds that may feel familiar or perplexing on the longest day and longest night on our planet.

 

Luminous Being (Performance), Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson
Luminous Being is a multi-sensory sound and visual performance, featuring classical violinist Audrey Wright adorned in a garment displaying sound-responsive light patterns created by artist Geoff Robertson. Including music by Wright, Bach, Ysaÿe, and von Bingen, the program explores narratives of luminescence throughout nature and human experience.

 

Pulses (Workshop), Jason Snell
Pulses is a biofeedback music workshop where the rhythms of the heart and mind converge to create a collaborative symphony. During this 45 minute workshop, participants utilize biosensor headsets to trigger a unique octave of notes based on their brain activity. The group’s collective heart rate sets the tempo. Together they weave a dynamic composition as neural rhythms synchronize to create orchestral pulses. Following the session, participants have the opportunity to reflect on the interplay between their neural activity, heart rhythms, and the emerging music, fostering a deeper understanding of collective creativity.

 

radiance & resonance (Performance), Claire Alrich, Andrew Toy – with Vivian Chen, MissJessica Denson, Emi Kawashima, Patricia Mullaney-Loss, Thomas Northrup
radiance & resonance is a time-lapse of the summer solstice. Mirroring the movement of the sun, this performance uses sound, movement, and textiles to construct and then deconstruct a visual and sonic landscape. Using a devised score, Andrew and Claire build a collaborative audio-visual experience that equally utilizes movement and sound. Both the choreography and the music are inspired by natural unfoldings in nature, building from a calm and meditative state to excited celebration and then back to where it began.

 

(Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles (Performance), Stephanie E. Vasko
(Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles is a live, twenty-minute audiovisual performance which will take the audience on a journey through time, space, and the cycles of nature, focusing from the darkness of Winter Solstice 2023 to the luminosity of Summer Solstice 2024. This piece will start in darkness, silence, and sparsity before evolving through time, temperature, and luminosity into sounds (recorded, embodied, sampled), objects, and movements from and inspired by the Winter and Summer solstices. (Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles will end with opportunities for collaborative/community sound and scene making.

 

Sonic Altar (Interactive installation), Claire Alrich, Michelle Harvey, Emi Kawashima, Maya Renfro, Gia Serano, Dag Yeshiwas
Sonic Altar is an interactive installation where audience choices shape a dynamic soundscape and visual display. This immersive experience explores the solstice theme by emphasizing the cumulative impact of individual choices on the natural world.

 

Study #4: Light, Affect, Sound (Installation), Bureau of Sensory Affairs; Alma Laprida and Nate Scheible, co-chairs
On May 18, 2024, The BSA conducted Study #4, examining the relationship between light and sound. Nine artists were situated in a dark space, exposed to different intensities of light, and asked to “translate” their sensations into sound. The study was guided by questions including: How do we perceive light? How is that perception reflected consciously or unconsciously through emotions and memory? And is that reflection concrete or abstract?
The study is presented as an installation, including a short video documentary of the process, audio pieces based on the recordings, and a presentation of the data within the BSA’s workspace, including notes, graphs, objects, and photographs.

 

时 (Time) (Interactive installation), cash, Susan Zhong
时 (Time) is a unique experience that involves a special cultural perspective. Through sonic and visual elements, audiences will sense the change in time from one solstice to another within an immersive environment.

 

Trying It (Installation), VeJai Alston, Danyela J. Brown, and Tony Bush (DMV Kiki Nights)
Trying It is a land art collaboration with DMV Kiki Nights that troubles the notion of an underground Ballroom Scene. DMV Kiki Nights documents and promotes the Kiki Ballroom Scene in the region, despite a scarcity of accessible, stable spaces in Chocolate City. The month of pride inundates the community with daylight, yet four June balls have been canceled this year due to venue shade. Trying It consists of a hillock covering a speaker looping recorded audio of a kiki ball: Rocheny Pricien’s (@godiva_sterling) The Pride Kickoff Ball 6/1/24 at The Pocket, DJ: VeJai Alston (@pumpdabeat), MC: Tony Bush (@dmvkikinights), Judge: Danyela June Brown (@se3ingth1ngs). The bodiless footprint of the work reflects the fungibility of time-based queer genres.

 

What Goes Around, Comes Around (Interactive installation), David Greenfieldboyce
Every year has the same days and many of the same events, and they are similar in some ways year-to-year, but always different. The memories of these repeated events echo and stack up, and together they make the substance of our lives. Audiences are invited to step into the center of a ring of speakers addressing a microphone. The words, songs, or sounds that they make will travel around them in circles and layer into a revolving, live soundscape.

 

The Yin & Yang of the Sun (Interactive performance), The Pseudoscientists with Wu Shen Tao Martial Arts; Sam Miller, Julian Weaver, Kenny Chrzanowski, Alex Zitto
A visual and auditory celebration of the Solstice combining modular synths with movements of Tai-Chi.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 22

SCHEDULED ACTIVITIES

 

10 AM

Plaza
Workshop: Expanding Ground
Althea Rao and Layla Klinger

Lower Level
Art Cart: Light Up Your Life!

 

10:30 AM       

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

 

11 AM

Plaza
Performance: The Yin & Yang of the Sun 
The Pseudoscientists with Wu Shen Tao Martial Arts; Sam Miller, Julian Weaver, Kenny Chrzanowski, Alex Zitto

 

11:30 AM

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

Meet in Lobby
Highlights Tour
Hirshhorn Gallery Guides

 

12 PM

Plaza
Performance: Clear Channel
Awad Bilal, Don Godwin, Mary Jane Regalado

 

12:30 PM

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

 

1 PM

Level 2
Performance: Across the Open Spaces
KHORIKOS

Plaza
Workshop: Expanding Ground
Althea Rao and Layla Klinger

 

1:30 PM

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Luminous Being
Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

 

2 PM

Plaza
Performance: (Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles
Stephanie E. Vasko

 

2:30 PM

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Meet in Lobby
Highlights Tour
Hirshhorn Gallery Guides

 

3 PM

Plaza
Performance: radiance & resonance
Claire Alrich, Andrew Toy – with Vivian Chen, MissJessica Denson,
Emi Kawashima, Patricia Mullaney-Loss, Thomas Northrup

 

3:30 PM

Plaza
Workshop: Expanding Ground
Althea Rao and Layla Klinger

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

 

4 PM

Plaza
Performance: Karnatik Music’s Celestial Compositions
Balakrishnan Raghavan, Alex Wand

Ongoing interactive audio art installations on the Plaza, Level 2, and Level 3.

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SUNDAY, JUNE 23

SCHEDULED ACTIVITIES

10 AM

Plaza
Performance: The Yin & Yang of the Sun 
The Pseudoscientists with Wu Shen Tao Martial Arts; Sam Miller, Julian Weaver, Kenny Chrzanowski, Alex Zitto

 

10:30 AM       

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

 

11 AM

Plaza
Workshop: Expanding Ground
Althea Rao and Layla Klinger

Plaza
Performance: Karnatik Music’s Celestial Compositions
Balakrishnan Raghavan, Alex Wand

 

11:30 AM

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

 

12 PM

Plaza
Performance: Clear Channel
Awad Bilal, Don Godwin, Mary Regalado

 

12:30 PM

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

 

1 PM

Level 2
Performance: Across the Open Spaces
KHORIKOS

 

1:30 PM

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Luminous Being
Audrey Wright, Geoff Robertson

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

 

2 PM

Plaza
Performance: (Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles
Stephanie E. Vasko

 

2:30 PM

Plaza
Workshop: Expanding Ground
Althea Rao and Layla Klinger

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Level 3
Workshop:
Alternative Energy Powered Electronic Instruments with Vaux Flores
Travis Johns

 

3 PM

Plaza
Performance: radiance & resonance
Claire Alrich, Andrew Toy – with Vivian Chen, MissJessica Denson,
Emi Kawashima, Patricia Mullaney-Loss, Thomas Northrup

 

3:30 PM

Lower Level | Ring Auditorium
Workshop: close|  distant
Heike Kaltenbrunner, Mathias Lenz

Level 3
Workshop: Pulses
Jason Snell

Ongoing interactive audio art installations on the Plaza, Level 2, and Level 3.

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 About The DC Listening Lounge + Sound Scene

Sound Scene began in 2008 and is still curated by the DC Listening Lounge audio arts collective and is now hosted by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Sound Scene is an annual, free, two-day event, open to the public. In 2019 Sound Scene broke attendance records for the Hirshhorn museum attracting more than 14,000 attendees over 2 days. Sound Scene celebrates sound through multi-sensory art installations including sculptural, headphone-based and multi-channel interactive exhibits. Our live stage features performances of dance, music, and spoken word. Sound Scene’s small group workshops 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 soundscenefest.org for more information.