ReSounding Success: Celebrating 75 Years of STEM with the NSF
ReSounding Success celebrated sound and science in Chicago on May 10, 2025. The event offered Chicago residents ways to explore sound and learn about the National Science Foundation’s role in supporting citizen science and research projects on the design of out-of-school learning. More than 100 people gathered for the family-friendly event where DJs welcomed the science curious to Eden Place Farms. Participants took refuge from the sunny, windy afternoon in the auditorium where the ReSounding Success team screened films about citizen science, the science of waves and music-making, Chicago’s Botanic Gardens youth programs, and other short films. Outdoors, Solidarity Studios affiliated sound producers offered a workshop on the Science of BeatMaking, while Massachusetts College of Art and Design seniors led a Sound2Sight listening and sketching challenge. A panel featuring sound engineers, DJs, a sound preservationist, sound ecosystem designers, and producers answered questions such as:
- What sounds inspire you?
- Do you have to go to school to have a career in sound?
- What avenues for learning has sound opened up?
- How did you come to understand that different cultures use and interpret sound in different ways?
Educators and sound artists again took over the program, bringing the physical experience of sound to the fore. The Detroit team of sound artists tuned the groups’ senses, waking participants up to the smells and sounds around them. With Princess Kemet, and Eden Place Farms co-founder Mrs. Amelia Howard, the group walked to an ambisonic installation at nearby Eden Place Nature Center. Detroit sound artists had collected and composed sounds from nature, mixed them with all types of sounds, percussive beats and chimes, creating original compositions that gave the group goosebumps.
Ethan Coen explained:
Maro (Kariya) and I have been working together for a while now on this and what we’ve discovered is we are actually creating something that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s bringing an awareness to our space, it’s bringing a kind of interactivity with our environment that is not directional. It’s all-around, it’s peripheral, and it’s really expanded my perception of how sound can be part of a community or part of an environment, part of a space in a way that I had never really had the chance to explore before.
Read more about the program, Sound Travels.