A soundwalk for Boston Common.

Let your route be arbitrary.
There is no particular place you need to be.
Feel free to sit down and rest whenever you’d like.
If you move through the Common in a non-goal oriented way, the score will shift based upon the path you choose.

Traces is a user-guided geolocated soundwalk through Boston Common that invites listeners to imagine the history of an iconic landscape through a radically altered composition of the park’s sounds. A musical composition of electronically processed field recordings, found sounds and archival recordings are woven into a lush soundscape designed to deepen perception of this historic place.

By shifting our attention from sight to sound, Traces offers a spherical experience of place, rather than a linear one: a layered sonic architecture where personal associations and echoes of history are omnidirectional.

Rather than telling a fixed story, Traces amplifies quiet voices and ephemeral impressions, making the participant both witness and storyteller. In the private seclusion of headphones, listeners move through the park, free to wander and imagine—remapping The Common on their own terms.

Traces offers us a chance to slow down, listen, and discover our own relationship to the unseen contours of a public space.

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to live is to leave traces

walter benjamin
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for elizabeth