Update Thu 2/7: The starting point of the “Hear Below” soundwalk has changed. Meet near the Wow Bao in the Michigan Plaza of the Illinois Center, near the northeast corner of Michigan and Lake.
“We’re trying to raise awareness of the interrelationships of sound and listening and environment,” says Leonardson, who serves as cochair of the MSAE. “The best way to do that is through a soundwalk, where you’re not talking about listening but you’re actually doing it. Better to understand just by doing.”
Hear Below: Listening to Chicago UndergroundUpdate Thu 2/7: The meeting point has changed. Please refer to the note at the top of this story. A soundwalk in the Chicago Pedway, presented by the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and NON:op. Sat 2/9, 2 PM, meet in the lobby of One Prudential Plaza, 130 E. Randolph, free, all-ages
The Pedway provides shelter from the elements as well as access to shops, restaurants, city offices, the Cultural Center, Block 37, and Metra and CTA train lines, among other things. Though it’s cut off from the sounds of nature and of street traffic, the Pedway is a useful place to demonstrate the MSAE’s belief that our sonic surroundings should be a public concern. The organization has never limited its activities to partly wild or unbuilt spaces—it maintains that all environments are worth listening to, and that tuning in to them can better connect us to the good and bad in our communities.
As an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University in the late 1970s, he wanted to pursue video art, then a cutting-edge medium. Unfortunately the price of the gear was cutting-edge too. “To have your video kit to make video art—no way, that stuff was just way out of reach financially,” he says. He found sound equipment more accessible, and eventually he acquired a microphone, a reel-to-reel recorder, and a used analog synthesizer. In 1983 he earned an MFA in Time Arts from SAIC—the school’s sound department didn’t yet offer a master’s degree, so he’d entered a program that grouped other time-based media such as video and performance.
The American Society for Acoustic Ecology formed in 2006, and chapters sprang up in New York City, the Bay Area, and New Mexico, among other places. In 2009 Leonardson decided to start a chapter for the midwest. “I didn’t know of anything going on elsewhere in the middle of the country,” he says. “So I was bold, or idiotic, and called it Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. We became a formal chapter of American Society for Acoustic Ecology, which is associated with this group that was formed 25 years ago, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.”
In 2016, the MSAE’s free public soundwalk series became part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks. Each year the group brings in a variety of teaching artists to host walks, the themes of which have included learning the calls of Chicagoland frogs and using special listening stations to hear the sounds just below the surface of Lake Michigan.
