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Sound Scene 2025: Connected
June 1, 2025 | 10:00 am–5:00 pm
FREE
SATURDAY, MAY 31 | 10 AM–5 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 1 | 10 AM–5 PM
What is Sound Scene?
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 DC and around the world.
2025 Featured Artists and Works
INSTALLATIONS
Echo Nexus—David Cardona, Alvaro Morales, Anna Schwartz
Echo Nexus is an interactive installation driven by a custom icosahedron-shaped musical instrument. Audiences are invited to engage with the instrument to explore collective expressions of real-time music and visuals, building novel sensory experiences based on collaboration and collective interplay.
Touch—Katrin Enni
Touch is an interactive sonic installation inviting visitors to explore the intimate connection among gesture, sound, and invisible materiality. Through hand movements alone—tracked by camera-based sensors—participants sculpt and shape dynamic electronic soundscapes in real time. By merging tactile imagination with digital technology, Touch transforms gesture into sonic experience, creating an immersive dialogue between body and sound.
Made possible with support from the National Cultural Endowment of Estonia
We Are a Pattern—Duncan Figurski
We Are a Pattern is an interactive audio installation in which participants are asked to touch a rotating canvas conveyor belt as it passes on a podium in front of them. The marks left on the canvas by continuous touch are converted into a live graphic score as they pass under a camera that controls a drone and moderates the visual system. This complex instrument can be played only by a group over long periods of sustained interaction.
Control—Emily Francisco
Control is a 61-key reed organ that functions as a pump organ but has been modified to split the signals into a five-part, twelve-channel audiovisual system controlled by the keyboard. The instrument processes audio and video signals from live broadcast television through antennas and digital tuners. Two octaves of the keyboard (the first and fifth) send video signals from the digital tuners to seven monitors, creating an interference, as the monitors are receiving constant CCTV surveillance feeds. Three octaves of the keyboard (the second, third, and fourth) control audio signals. The second and fourth octaves are sent through effects processors, lowering the pitch of the audio in the second octave and raising the pitch in the fourth. All three octaves are fed from the stereo out DTT901 digital television tuners, split through the reed organ keyboard, and play back through stereo speakers to either side of the reed organ.
Made possible with support from the DCCAH Arts and Humanities Fellowship
Housework Commons—Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel, Sofy Yuditskaya
Housework Commons is a feminist activist installation that transforms domestic tools into musical instruments using machine learning and embedded sensor technologies, inviting audiences to participate in communal housework as performative sound art. By blending installation and live participation, it reimagines domestic labor—traditionally confined to the private sphere—as a shared act of creativity and community through public engagement with these unassuming quotidian objects. Housework Commons consists of three custom-built digital musical instruments:
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Embedded Iron, a 3D-printed antique iron with sensors trained with machine learning, by Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel, Robert Cosgrove, Omkar Bhatt, and Matthew Blessing
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Rheostat Rotary Rack, a rotary drying rack with potentiometers and rotary encoder, by Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel, Bryan Jacobs, and Melody Loveless
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Embroidery Hoop, with an embroidered textile speaker that acts as an electromagnetic scanner, by Sofy Yuditskaya, Jocelyn Ho, and Margaret Schedel
Tag Team—Synthador, Roman Martinez
Tag Team is the ultimate example of two who are “connected” in a squared circle, presented by El Paso artist Roman Martinez and the mysterious Synthador. Two luchadores stand before you, each ready for you to approach and scream, clap, cheer, or even “trash talk,” and your audio is looped and drives real-time 8-bit visualization. This retro, lo-fi aesthetic evokes a connection to “days gone by.”
WORKSHOP / INSTALLATION
A Thousand Mornings—Double Yolk Collective: Beccy Abraham, Laura Coe, Alan Kuang, Albert Zhang
Come play with dance and sound! Join Double Yolk Collective for an interactive performance workshop. Team up with a friend to tap into your own electricity as we turn the ground we stand on into an instrument that makes music at the places we touch.
Register for the workshop here.
PERFORMANCES
An Appeal to Reason—KOKAYI
An Appeal to Reason is a musical composition and sound installation that channels Thomas Mann’s protest against fascism and his commitment to democracy. Blending archival recordings, classical motifs, and contemporary sound design, it offers a layered, spatialized audio experience. The work serves as both a meditation on reason, humanity, and resistance, and a reflection of hip-hop’s ethos—creating meaning from limited means. DC-based multidisciplinary artist KOKAYI remixes memory through sound, film, sculpture, and found materials.
Audio Flux Circuit 5: In 3D—Julie Shapiro, John DeLore, Eric Drysdale
Audio Flux celebrates innovative, short-form audio work and bold storytelling. Join us for the debut of “Circuit 05: In 3D,” created in partnership with 3D photography aficionado Eric Drysdale. Together we’ll listen to fluxworks from around the world, meet some of the producers behind these stories, revel in the “sound of place,” and geek out about the magic of 3D—before our eyes and in our ears.
Below the Surface—Farida Hughes, Matt Keown
Below the Surface is an immersive multimedia collaboration between visual artist Farida Hughes and percussionist Matt Keown, a synthesis of Hughes’s luminous abstract art and Keown’s intricate percussion compositions. Together the artists construct a dialogue that celebrates the primal forces of nature—creative volcanic activity, the flow of water, the resilience of the earth—as metaphors for the unknowable power of human creativity and connection.
The Power of Sound! Harmony & Dissonance Surround Us—Estephanie Rose, Manuel De La Luz, Iliana Garabyare
The Power of Sound! Harmony and Dissonance Surround Us is an immersive and interactive sonic meditative experience that aims to increase awareness of our relationship to sound, our environment, and ultimately one another. This multisensory live soundscape performance will use resonant sound healing and acoustic instruments, as well as analog manipulations, to mimic sounds of the natural world and beyond. Our focus is to explore the constant sonic exchanges between people and their environment—a symbiotic relationship; some in harmony, some dissonant—by taking participants through an immersive sonic journey.
I Resist This—Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Leo Grierson, Peter Pattengill
I Resist This is a 30-minute performance featuring two dancers activating soft-sculpture wearables scored by an innovative original soundscape. Using movement and languages of weight-sharing and improvisation, the pair of performers interface with squishy, body-like sculptures to explore the inherent tension between independence and interdependence.
Kimyan Law Live—Kimyan Law
Kimyan Law is a Congolese-Austrian musician, producer, filmmaker and painter, an interdisciplinary artist who incorporates African instruments, patterns, and influences into his music, achieving a rare organic and human quality among cold electronics. Deep explorations into his Congolese roots have led him to create complex mosaics of ancient imagery and sound with modern aesthetics.
In Live, the songs and their stories transport the listener through colorful sonoric landscapes, timbres, and dreams deep into Kimyan Law’s world. Through drumming, sampling, and playing live, the music happens in the moment, giving the concert a warm and organic quality in contrast to often formulaic approaches to performing electronic music.
Made possible with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum
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 an annual, free, two-day event, open to the public. In 2024, Sound Scene broke attendance records for the Hirshhorn, attracting more than 19,000 attendees over two days. Sound Scene features the creative work of artists from around the world and celebrates sound through multisensory art installations, including sculptural, headphone-based, and multichannel 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.
Visit soundscene.org for more information.
Sound Scene 2025: Connected; Design by Ash Farrand
Image credit: Sound Scene 2024. Photo: Anthony Washington
