Public Presentation

ESS hosts a bi-weekly series of hour-long afternoon performances in the acoustically pristine studio space. It’s a great opportunity to hear Chicago’s musical luminaries in a relaxed, intimate setting.

Outer Ear is an outgrowth of our enormously successful Outer Ear Festival of Sound, which presented over 200 artists’ works during the past ten years.  No longer limited to a three-week festival framework, the new Outer Ear will present an exciting range of performances, installations, concerts, screenings, broadcasts, and web projects throughout the year at numerous locations throughout Chicago.

Florasonic is a unique program that commissions composers and artists to make new site-specific music and audio art installations for the Fern Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, a turn-of-the-century greenhouse. Curated by ESS Executive Director Lou Mallozzi, florasonic presents each project for three to five months, visited by an estimated 500 to 1,000 people each day.

Audible at ESS is a public space and gallery for exhibitions, meetings, workshops, performances, and artists projects. A simple 400-square-foot space at street level, the space is not only used for ESS programs and events, but is also open to proposals by artists, organizations, and community members.

Favorite Chicago Sounds is a collaborative web site designed to showcase unique audio portraits of Chicago and mirror what Chicagoans think about their city’s soundscape. FCS is a program of Experimental Sound Studio and operates in partnership with Chicago Public Radio, who auditions FCS-collected sounds for broadcast as part of their ongoing Sonic Soundscapes project. The “Favorite Sounds” project was initiated in London in 1998 by sound artist Peter Cusack and has been carried out in Beijing and other world cities.