‘Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK’ Offers an Invisible Concert in the Woods (Review)

My favorite childhood books felt magical because the characters discovered secret worlds that became their own. Lucy in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe discovered Narnia’s talking animals; Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden tended a garden that healed her sick friend; Jesse and Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia created a small kingdom through their treehouse in the woods. These books prompted my own exploring for small and beautiful spaces that could be my own. Though this exploring was mostly confined to my younger days, the Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK harkened back to those feelings. SOUNDWALK is a location-based musical experience that breathes wonder into familiar outdoor spaces and invites you to discover that wonder for yourself.

SOUNDWALK (composed and sound designed by Ellen Reid and performed by musicians of the New York Philharmonic) comes in the form of an app that is currently linked to five parks: Central Park in New York; Griffith Park in Los Angeles; Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Northern Virginia; Elizabeth River Trail in Norfolk, VA; and Pleasure House Point Natural Area in Virginia Beach, VA. The app transforms these parks into orchestral concerts by using GPS to play music specific to your exact location. The technology allows for a self-directed exploration that intimately connects the listener, the music, and the park environment.

I did the Central Park chapter of SOUNDWALK on a snowy evening in February just before sunset. It was cold and I am not a diehard orchestral music fan, so I was unsure how long I would last. My main question going in was how this would be different from walking around while listening to music on Spotify. That’s where the app comes in. It’s a map of Central Park, chunked into overlapping sections. As I walked through the park, my GPS locator entered the corresponding sections on the map; these sections then turned from gray to a bright pink. At first I stared at the app as I walked around, trying to make new sections light up pink and detect if the music changed. It did, but not like changing tracks on an album. The music shifted gradually; the instrumentation thinned and then built up into a new theme as I moved deeper into a section.

As I began to trust that the music changed according to where I walked, I put the phone away and began observing my surroundings. This is when the magic began — when I noticed connections between the music and the environment. Upon cresting a hill, I heard a swelling triumphant theme. When I reached a fork in the path of a wooded section, the instrumentation thinned to a single quivering cello, which seemed like appropriate “which path will you choose?” music. Though the music was intentionally tied to the physical elements of Central Park, I soon noticed myself interpreting the music in relation to people that I saw. A group walking on an icy section of the Central Park Lake by the Bethesda Terrace paired with ominous, discordant music made me wonder just how thick the ice was. The ebullient theme that accompanied a toddler shakily crossing a path with his caregiver made me feel the profundity of learning to walk. SOUNDWALK created a causal link between the music, my location, and the environment, which gave rise to a cinematic experience that included both myself and others as characters. I ended up walking around for about an hour, and returned the next few days to cover areas of the park that I didn’t get to the first time.

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My second experience of the Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK was at The Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, which launched in early April. The music is the same as the Central Park chapter, but mapped specifically for the quirky space of Wolf Trap: a park with amphitheaters, clusters of picnic tables, wooded hiking trails, and a large, still pond. Hearing this music a second time in a new location connected to my first experience of SOUNDWALK in surprising ways. My favorite piece was a dramatic theme of deep cellos and bells, and hearing this while walking on a trail in Virginia in the throws of spring brought me auditorily, visually, and emotionally back to the snowy evening in the northwest edge of Central Park. These two unrelated places became linked through the music and chaptering of this location-based experience.

These moments of discovery are encouraged by the “Easter eggs’’ hidden throughout SOUNDWALK in the form of poems, vocals, and choral pieces at specific locations. These moments struck me most at Wolf Trap because they are centered around the three amphitheaters. When I walked into the largest of the amphitheaters, The Filene Center, a singular female voice echoed through the stadium seating. Then I meandered down the hill into the woods, crossed the bridge over the stream, and followed the path to the Theatre in the Woods. I climbed atop the wooden benches, and discovered that if I stood still, a chorus of heavenly voices sang the resplendent “So Much On My Soul” (composed by Ellen Reid, lyrics and performance by The Young People’s Chorus of New York City). It made me feel like I was the sole audience of an invisible concert. Or rather, and perhaps even more magical, that there was an ancient chorus in the woods that has been singing through time, and that I had just pulled back the curtain and could now take part in it. A slice of childhood wonder conjured up through music and technology, Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK lets you discover a hidden world in plain sight.

Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is available now, free of charge. Visit the webpage for site-specific information about the experience.

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