Sarah Belle Reid, “Florasonic: Semblance of Fern,” 2025, at Lincoln Park Conservatory/Photo: Experimental Sound Studio
Shielded from the unpredictable changing winds of the upcoming winter, Lincoln Park Conservatory is protected within a Victorian-style greenhouse, kept perpetually tropical. The four small colorful rooms follow a circular path through thoughtfully curated environments of towering palms, verdant ferns, alluring orchards and bright show flowers. “Florasonic: Semblance of Fern” adds Sarah Belle Reid’s provocative soundscape to the Fern Room through a collaboration with the Experimental Sound Studio. Playing at the top of every hour, the site-specific composition of mathematically inspired synth patterns wakes up from the hum of the living garden and paints a fictitious portrait of speculative environments before the speakers fall back silent. On view through November 23, the quadraphonic installation is a necessary reinvigoration of the senses during Chicago’s sporadic chilling.
The elevated speakers almost blend into the greenhouse as the sounds of the Fern Room’s small insects, turtles and blowing fans interlace with the electronic bursts that on first approach almost sound like the buzz of the city seeming through the transparent walls. Over the course of the piece, distinct movements reveal additional conversations between the electronic cast of sounds. Sarah Belle Reid, in collaboration with Ryan Gaston, designed an instrument that gives breath to eight variations of the Barnsley Fern, a mathematical algorithm that generates squiggly fern leaf-like fractals. These variations of the algorithm grow, weave and battle for space throughout the microscopically detailed recording. Instead of instrumental characters, the synths, whose wave forms morph somewhat smoothly, seem to describe individual sonic characters through their distinctive timbre and style.
Sarah Belle Reid, “Florasonic: Semblance of Fern,” 2025, at Lincoln Park Conservatory/Photo: Experimental Sound Studio
The static hum of the speakers grow into beeps, bloops, squeaks and squeals that fall like water droplets, mirroring the two water features that flank the Fern Room. Other variations sound like scaling lizards, their curious animalistic sounds building into a heated cacophony that crowd the prehistoric ferns with dinosaurs, their original habitat. More instrumental synths oscillate through the four-point speakers, moving like flying birds on buzzing electronic wings, complete with chirps that fill the humid room with sonic mosquitoes. As the sun sets in the score, a low hum emerges with shrill shrieks that fight over an impending throb of the low end.
The installation is a morose confluence of the natural and technological, shattering the artificial and human divide. As a whole, the conservatory is an island of life, from which emerges a fused multispeciation alignment of visitors on romantic dates, long from home ecosystems and innovative electronic creation. “Florasonic” grows upon a dense history of environmental sonics, ranging from Plantasia to Reid’s previous work replicating bird calls. Whether or not the soundscape helps the plants grow, this fall the Fern Room has transformed into an eerie bouquet of otherworldly sounds atop luscious waterfalls of interwoven green tendrils.
Experimental Sound Studio’s “Florasonic: Semblance of Fern” by Sarah Belle Reid continues at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 North Stockton Drive, through November 23.
