James Everest creates interactive outdoor symphonies with “Sound Gardens”

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesotan is composing outdoor symphonies inspired by local ecology, history and geography.
Outside the Minneapolis Institute of Art, musician and composer James Everest is connecting speakers, hanging wind chimes and tending to his 3D sound garden.
“This was always about how can I create an accompaniment for the dance or the concert that’s already happening in nature,” Everest said.
For Everest, it’s a chance to live out his childhood passions.
“My very first composition, when I was 3 years old, was a thunderstorm on the upright piano,” he said.
So how does Everest describe the relationship between music and Mother Nature?
“In terms of the way I compose the music, I really am taking a cue from an ecosystem,” he said. “From a way that different elements are coming and going, the way a weather system might move through a space, or the way two birds may be call-and-responding to each other.”
In 2016, Everest introduced a new model, using spatial speaker sets of various sizes, to create an immersion of sound for music composed in the environment in which it’s installed. Each speaker has to be carefully placed and manually synched.
“It’s kind of (like) synchronized watches, where you have to have them all individually playing, but following the same thing so that the whole piece of music stays together,” he said.
As you walk through a sound garden, every step or turn of the head results in a different mix and arrangement of the music. There are interactive elements as well.
“We also have something that we call ‘human wind chimes,’ where the orchestra members will each have one note and a mallet and we will circulate throughout the space playing the wind chimes all together but different notes,” he said.
To get the optimal effect of the sound garden, Everest says one may need to spend a few minutes in a spot to adjust to the sounds around them.
There’s not only a calming effect, but potentially the ability to heal. Everest has brought sound gardens to local healthcare facilities and nursing homes.
“They’re starting to see what the benefits are of things like improvisation and playing music in a way where you’re in the driver’s seat like this,” he said.
The gardens also feature site-specific poetry, visual art, storytelling, dance and other performances.  
Everest is one of this year’s Finnovation Fellows supported by the Bush Foundation.
There is a free Fall Sound Garden featuring musicians, dancers and spoken word artists at Caponi Art Park in Eagan on Sept. 14-15 from noon to 4 p.m.
You can also experience a Sound Garden at Park After Dark at St. Paul’s Crosby Farm on Friday, Sept. 20 from 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.