Sound Garden
A user-created immersive audio experience for mobile divices.
by Paul Rudy
Click on a seedpacket and listen to your sound grow. Plant multiple sounds and listen to they interact with each other and with others in the room!
Everywhere we go, we encounter a sound garden composed by life itself. For years, I have gathered sounds from these living gardens and recomposed them into music. In Sound Garden, I have gathered the seeds, and you get to choose what is planted! Plant a sound with your phone and listen as it lives out its own life cycle. Plant multiple seeds and discover what happens between them. Enjoy the ever-evolving music created in relationship with the art on the walls, the space around you, and the seeds you and others have planted.
Sound Garden was Commissioned for the exhibit Asclepias in the Garden: Nature as a Model for Age Friendly Health Care with Older Adults October 17, 2026 – January 6, 2027.
The garden has inspired humans across millennia as a sanctuary, teacher, and healer. In this exhibition, the garden serves as an area of contemplation for the evidenced-based Age Friendly Health Care system known as the 4Ms: What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility. The visual, interactive, and sound elements presented offer a sensory-rich creative approach. By sparking curiosity and encouraging exploration of the 4Ms through representations of nature, the artworks connect these concepts to personal motivations, purpose, appropriate care, and understanding.
Asclepias is the Greek god associated with physicians, healing, and medicinal herbs. His name is also associated with the group of plants known as milkweeds, which includes Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly milkweed or pleurisy root, because historically it was used to treat respiratory illnesses. Milkweeds contain cardiac glycosides, which are poisonous when consumed directly but have shown potential as anti-cancer agents in research laboratories. As the essential host plant of the Monarch Butterfly, milkweeds offer a symbol of resilience and endurance.
As you move about the exhibition, how does what you see and hear make you feel about aging and care?
Please share your thoughts on a postcard and clip it to the display to add your experience of the exhibition.
Acknowledgments
This exhibition was developed by artist Marguerite Perret as part of the Kansas 4M/KU Spencer Museum of Art Arts Research Integration (ARI) Fellowship. Perret is the inaugural artist fellow in this partnership and also serves as a professor of art at Washburn University. Perret collaborated with Bruce Scherting, independent exhibition designer and former director of Project Art at University of Iowa Health Care, and Paul Rudy, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of composition at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory.
Funding for the ARI Fellowship and this exhibition was provided through a subaward from the Kansas 4M Geriatrics Workforce Education Program, a Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program (GWEP) supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of, nor an endorsement by, HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government.
Additional funding comes from KU’s Spencer Museum of Art, with planning support from Andrea McMillan, KU School of Medicine Graduate Medical Education; Brittany Nanney, University of Kansas Hospital Fund Development; Jamie Allison Rees, Clendening Library & Museum; Celka Straughn, Spencer Museum of Art; and Teri Kennedy, Kansas 4M Geriatrics Workforce Education Program.