The Tree Hotel
(a sonic walk)

On June 15th, 2024, Sarah Kate Kramer, Laura Nova, and I conducted "Sounds for the Tree Hotel” at the M'Finda Kalunga Community Garden, in the Lower East Side of NYC.

This was a curated sound walk in which we led participants through “ear tuning” exercises to take measure of the garden’s soundscape.

The event was inspired by the work of composer and self-proclaimed “Acoustic Ecologist,” R. Murray Schafer who thought a lot about the sounds of his environment and the effects of noise on living things.  He wrote: “The world is a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time, without a beginning and presumably without an ending.”

If the world is a huge musical composition, we are simultaneously its audience, performers, and composers.  Framing the world as this musical composition, the event concluded with an improvised concert for the trees of the garden.