Ellen Reid: A soundtrack for your walk in the park
UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance brings sound art into nature
Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is a GPS-enabled work of public sound art that gives users a customized soundtrack for their walk. Subtly shifting compositions change along with users’ paths to reflect their environment.
SOUNDWALK's creator is the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound artist Ellen Reid. UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance presented the Griffith Park version of the app.
In an interview with the UCLA Arts podcast Works In Progress, Reid explains how she made SOUNDWALK, how walking and jogging are part of her composing process, and what makes LA a great city in which to compose music.
Creating a sound project with the user as collaborator, Reid said, was “a different experience, for sure, than writing for the concert hall or a film or something like that, where the experience is very controlled and there's a fixed amount of time.”
Because the music continues without repeating, “it has kind of a kaleidoscopic sonic effect," Reid said. “I just had to create the framework that was flexible enough for people to be able to kind of stretch it for their experience," she said, whether someone is sitting still or jogging, or listening for several minutes or several hours.
Reid, who divides her time between New York and LA, often hikes or jogs in Griffith Park. But she doesn’t listen to music when she’s in nature.
"I am connected to my headphones or to my speakers for the majority of the day, so the walks or jogs are usually moments to kind of come back into the real world, the natural world," she said.
To create SOUNDWALK, Reid composed the music in her studio, then put on headphones and walked around her neighborhood to listen to the music in motion. Hearing it that way often felt very different than hearing it indoors.
“Inevitably I would write something and think it would need to be denser or faster. And whenever I would take a walk with it, I always wanted to slow it down,” she said.
Users with limited mobility can also enjoy the soundscapes, regardless of the pace or duration of their movements. The music can be heard while sitting in the park as well.
The world-renowned string quartet Kronos Quartet performs the music, along with a number of freelance musicians in New York and LA, who each recorded their tracks individually at home.
Ellen Reid, the composer and sound artist behind SOUNDWALK. Photo by Erin Baiano.
Reid grew up in Tennessee, where she sang in a church choir, played piano, and went to marching band competitions. She studied music at Columbia University, where she shifted her focus from teaching musicology to creating sound installations.
She lived and studied in Thailand, wrote music for theater companies in New York, and then received an M.F.A. in music at CalArts. She scored Sarah Adina Smith’s 2014 film The Midnight Swim, and contributed original music for Smith’s 2016 film Buster's Mal Heart.
"What I like about [scoring for film] is that you can be so detail oriented that, at this one specific moment, when a character does this specific thing, you can make the music really perfect. And there's something about that that feels so beautiful to me," she said.
Reid won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for p r i s m, a work created with librettist Roxie Perkins and director James Darrah that premiered at REDCAT as part of an LA Opera series of experimental works. The work is about surviving sexual assault, and was initiated before the #MeToo movement and completed during the Senate hearings for the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination.
The intention behind p r i s m, she said, "was to create a work that was about loss and was about bringing the audience into the experience of having a trauma.” Creating work that felt visceral, while helping the audience process the impact of the trauma, “was really challenging. To go into a place where I needed to go and stay there long enough to write it was really hard. But I think that the reward for doing something that felt very truthful is that it spoke to people.”
Reid has also been working to help talented composers from underrepresented communities get their start in music. She and fellow composer Missy Mazzoli founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program for young female, gender non-conforming, and non-binary composers. The program pairs these young composers with working mentors to help build professional connections and develop their careers.
Reid was the first composer to have works premiered by Los Angeles’ four leading musical institutions — the Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Los Angeles Master Chorale — all within one year.
She praised the “open-minded approach” to making music in LA, with composers interested in combining and crossing genres and mediums. And she looks forward to all that LA has to offer after the pandemic ends.
"Definitely a sweaty dance floor and the Korean spa. Wi Spa is heaven to me," she said.
Story by Avishay Artsy
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