Walking Festival of Sound 2026
From exploring the soundscapes of moonlit Bostonian sidewalks at dusk to celebrating International Dawn Chorus Day via an immersive sound installation, where sunrise wakes forests, one time zone after the next… From addressing the effects of noise pollution on human and more-than-human well-being to dissolving into a sonified realm of wireless signals, pervading our technologized lives… From being guided through the historical sonorities of Indigenous landscapes to exposing our sensorium to the hisses and buzzes of infrastructures that sustain modern lifestyles…
. . . the program for the 2026 edition of the Walking Festival of Sound is now live!
After visiting Stockholm, Newcastle, Kraków, Edinburgh, Seoul, Vancouver, and Zurich, the festival is coming to Boston and Cambridge! We are extremely proud to present the program.
Over the course of three weeks, the festival intends to craft a temporary zone for rewiring our senses by giving priority to a range of broadly understood walking and listening practices. Since the festival’s inception, our goal has been to rethink how we shape, relate to, and care for our environments by slowing down our movements and our sensorium. If the turn to walking can be understood as a critique of the acceleration that has become the normative mode of movement through our built and natural environments, then listening challenges the dominance of optical and visual regimes that govern how we navigate the world today.
Given the richness of contributions to this year’s edition, we are convinced that by stepping into this temporary zone, we stand a good chance of walking out of it with renewed attention to what, and who, surrounds us in our cities.
Contributors include Garnette Cadogan, Julie Shapiro, Brian House, Sarah Kanouse & Elisabeth Solomon, Christina Davis and many more.
full program available on www.wfos.net
with support from and partnership with Loeb Fellowship, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard ArtLab, ArtsThursdays, Harvard University Committe on the Arts (HUCA), Shelemay Sound Lab, and Harvard Arnold Arboretum.