Art Piece That Promotes Mental Wellness and Exercise For Everyone
By Dolores Quintana
Ellen Reid is a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, for her opera “p r i s m”, and sound artist whose work includes sound design, film scores, and choral and ensemble writing. Going into the third year of the pandemic with all the talk of how the pandemic has affected human physical and mental health, it is a great time to consider trying SOUNDWALK as a way to strengthen your physical fitness and enhance your mental well being.
SOUNDWALK: UCLA Campus is an interactive music performance where the music changes as you walk through the area. All you have to do is download the app and the map of the site while allowing your device to share your location and you are ready to go. Your experience can be as long or as short as you like and you can explore more than once based on the route you take and how much time you spend walking through the experience.
All SOUNDWALK locations will be available for exploration through 2023.
The website describes the experience this way, “Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is a free, GPS-enabled work of public art that uses music to illuminate the natural environment. Created by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound artist Ellen Reid, the experience is guided by the listener: the path you choose dictates the music you hear, and no two journeys will be exactly the same.”
The experience is presented by the Student Committee For The Arts and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) and is made possible in part by Mindscapes, Wellcome’s international cultural program about mental health.
Reid has this to say about the piece at UCLA. “This special SOUNDWALK is dedicated to the students, healthcare professionals, faculty, and staff of UCLA. It is intended as a complement to the main installation in Griffith Park, and I hope that it brings the same sense of reflection, adventure, and endless possibility to the UCLA campus. I welcome listeners to observe how sound can alter the perception of a place, beckoning them to explore new areas and to experience the familiar with a fresh perspective.”
CAP UCLA is also presenting the SOUNDWALK at Griffith Park that features The Kronos Quartet. You can find the website here. All SOUNDWALK performances can be experienced while observing social distancing guidelines and SOUNDWALK is described as “tailor-made for its setting, created to encourage calm reflection and introspection.”
