Whisper in a Lily’s Ear is a sensory immersion into the poetry of a city: a sonic interpretation of poems created by five women poets of Boston from the 18th through the 21st centuries, using data sonification to weave the recordings of the city with readings of the poems themselves. Set over a half-mile walk within the Public Garden, the piece utilizes the Echoes platform to activate location-based stereo sound files, tying together the visual imagery of the surrounding garden with the sensory imagery of the poems.

This fusion of sound and image moves across time as the listeners moves across the landscape, journeying through the city’s history and into its present moment. The length of the piece is approximately 45 minutes, if all sound files are accessed, yet the pacing, order, and direction is entirely user-dependent, allowing for time to rest and reflect during the reading of each poem.

The poetry readings are accompanied by dual streams of sonified data, altering the pitch of recorded sounds of Boston based on the frequency of each word with the poet’s corpus of work, and the frequency of that word within the English language, as determined via the Oxford English Dictionary’s letter frequency data.

The title of the piece is drawn from one of the poems, “Garden Confidence” by Jadene Felina Stevens.

The poets are Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911), Gertrude Hall (1863-1961), and Jadene Felina Stevens (1947-2013).

Each poem is tied to a prominent monument or landmark within the Public Garden, over a walking path covering approximately a half-mile from its southeastern to the northwestern points. In addition to recorded readings of the poems, two selections of modern-day sound recordings made in Boston accompany each poem, with varying pitches determined by word and letter frequency data within each poet’s body of work, and within the overall English language.

Surrounding the monuments/poems, ambient music from each relevant time period plays in the background.