It’s the Summer of Soundwalking. He Is Your Sherpa.

The term “soundwalking” was coined in the early 1970s by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who encouraged individual and group walks. He established the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to draw attention to the increasing intensity of noise and the importance of capturing natural and community soundscapes.

Although much can be discerned with the *** ear, especially with practice, Smolicki’s microphones were portals into the city’s hidden aural universe.

A small stream tumbling over rocks in the park was transformed into Victoria Falls. At the foot of a maple tree, he attached homemade geophones — copper and ceramic discs encased in a plastic Kinder egg and extended with a knitting needle to detect underground vibrations. He set up a second mic swaddled in a fuzzy wind protector known as a “dead cat” — a term he has disliked ever since vultures circled around him in Florida, mistaking the fuzz for a real dead cat.

Sound travels through roots. Smolicki rubbed the maple’s bark, which gave off a rackety scratching sound. He then moved on to a different tree — same intensity. I tried it myself on a tree even farther away, and it was just as loud. “We tend to perceive trees as vertical, but actually they are more horizontal,” Smolicki said. “Sound helps us visualize something that is otherwise imperceptible.”

Imperceptible or not-so, it’s the Summer of Sound in New York and beyond. Crowds have been flocking to “Clinamen: NYC” at the Park Avenue Armory, a “sonic meditation” by the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in which circular pools hold nearly 800 bobbing ceramic bowls, their rims gently colliding.

At the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, the 17th-century Giardino Mistico, or mystic garden, at the Holy See Pavilion offers a respite in “The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul” (through Nov. 22). It’s an invitation for “slowness and contemplation,” with headsets for visitors to listen to artists’ healing sounds embedded in the paths — Brian Eno beneath the lavender, for instance, or Patti Smith by the rose trellis. The curators, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, in collaboration with the international Soundwalk Collective, were inspired by a 12th-century mystic, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, for whom listening and sonic awareness was a cosmology.

“A lot of visual artists have experienced an interest in working with sound,” Obrist said. “In this busy and turbulent environment, it’s a concentrated moment.”