Child’s play

SPIN ZONE Douglas Ewart fiddles with his homemade tops in his studio. The devices make noise by whistling and rattling.

It’s sunset on September 1. In the shadow of the Kennedy Expressway, a young man in a polo shirt scrambles around the playground of Athletic Field Park, plastering eight contact microphones under the slides. When triggered by the chaotic activity of kids, the sensors will produce music. “I turned the whole playground into a giant MIDI keyboard,” Ryan Ingebritsen enthuses. “The slides, monkey bars, steps, climbing ramps and tunnels are kid-sized control pads.”

The local electroacoustic composer normally plays in the improvisational duo We Can and We Must and has written for groups such as International Contemporary Ensemble, but at the moment, he’s crouched beneath a blue plastic slide, twiddling with a makeshift mixing desk.

There are a few bemused faces at first, then a colorful rush of stumbling tots, then a cacophony of clarinet, chimes and percussion, ebbing and flowing through four speakers. In the background, sneaker squeaks from neighboring tennis and b-ball courts mingle with the splash of a fountain. The children stimulate the sounds with inexhaustible excitement without questioning the noises’ source. It’s a sonic sugar rush spurring a mass of shrieks and grins.

“It sounds like the Tuesday jazz night at rodan,” one adult says with a snicker. But six-year-old Katie of Andersonville is greatly impressed: “It makes me feel like I’m in a magic world, like a video game,” she says. “I don’t want it to end.”

JayVe Montgomery, senior program specialist of the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio, is the brains behind the idea. Formed in 2005 and funded by the Parkways Foundation, the studio offers kids the opportunity to write and record original stories, poems, songs, raps and more. After running day camps in parks over the summer, Montgomery decided to delve into interactive music. “As an audio aesthetic and longtime lover of playgrounds, I wanted to present the space as an environment for sonic exploration,” the 29-year-old Logan Square resident explains. “And playgrounds tend to bring out smiles.”

Montgomery contracted three sound artists to modify one playground each throughout the Chicago Park District. The first performance, on August 25, featured local composer and teacher Eric Leonardson, who brought the South Side’s Park Number 532 to life with a giant self-devised musical springboard. “I have an audio recording of a kid, about 12, proclaiming it as the happiest day of his life,” Montgomery says. “Why does this have to be a one-time event?"

On Sunday 20, Douglas Ewart—the highly regarded Jamaican multi-instrumentalist, Art Institute of Chicago professor and Velvet Lounge regular—will roll into Mt. Greenwood Park with a selection of his handmade Sonic Tops. Fashioned from bamboo, cups, saucers, candleholders, LPs, DVDs, toilet plungers, plastic jars and globes (to name just a few materials), the Sonic Tops are launched by hand to clatter and whirl across the ground. They’re designed to engage children “in a visceral, tactile, imaginative and intellectual manner,” Ewart says.

The 63-year-old will also enlist the help of tai chi artists, a jump-rope team and players from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “I want to link children and adults in a very basic yet complex manner,” Ewart says, “while magnifying the overlap of play and work, laughter and seriousness. Spinning a top on the contour rubber surface of Mt. Greenwood Park is full of physics experiments…and also lots of fun.”

Sonic Playground: Sonic Tops with Douglas Ewart hits Mt. Greenwood Park at 3pm on Sunday 20.

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