If a tree falls in the woods, the Young Sound Seekers aim to be around to hear it. The Atlantic Center for the Arts, the nonprofit co-funding Young Sound Seekers describes it as, “an environmental arts program for blind and partially sighted youth.” Dr. Nathan Wolek was able to pioneer the initiative in 2020 through a grant offered by the National Park Services’ Sounds and Night Skies division. “The grant was to do outreach programming for an underserved population,” Wolek explained. “And underserved was a broad term for some population that is maybe not as well represented in park visitors.”
On Oct. 19 the Young Sound Seekers enjoyed a slightly improvised excursion at the Gillespie Museum and Rinker Environmental Learning Center. Typically the group enjoys national parks and coastal soundscapes but due to damages at these sites from Hurricane Milton they stayed on campus.
Students from the Conklin Davis Center For the Visually Impaired partnered with Dr. Wolek’s student employees and First Year Seminar students to explore the museum. Coincidentally, the Gillespie Museum recently debuted its Uncertain Sanctuary exhibit which features tactile sculptures by Judith Greavu that the students enjoyed during setup.
Saturday’s lesson focused on sound masking, in this context meaning distracting sounds covering and impacting the intelligibility of others. After laughing through a short “Masking Mayhem” activity, the group moved outside of the Rinker Environmental Learning Center to record examples of sound masking in the natural landscape. The small groups wasted no time moving about the surrounding block and capturing soundscapes with their audio recording equipment.
Capturing sound is of course one of the major tasks for leaders and students alike in Young Sound Seekers. However, the program has created a handful of professional job opportunities for students on campus. Wolek recalls a psychology major who, “ enjoyed working with Young Sound Seekers [and] working with the park service. So much so that she… applied for jobs at park services…post-graduation and got hired by James County, up in Virginia, doing special audience programming for them.” This is a testament to the platform Young Sound Seekers provides for these students to have conversations about the natural soundscape, which is any combination of sounds created by the natural environment.
Michaela Hawthorne ’26 highlights potential job experience for students interested in photography through her work with Young Sound Seekers. “I also have a more specific role of managing social media,” Hawthorne said, “I’m like, taking pictures, recording lesson plans, so I can document it on the social media posts. And we really do have social media to help, like, promote the program and also show to our donors what we’re doing.”
Through the time spent observing the work, it is incredibly rewarding both academically and personally to see sound be explored and explained in a fashion that the average fully-sighted individual is not privy to. “I’ve learned a lot working with these kids in the Young Sound Seekers Program,” Wolek says. “It’s changed how I teach, the kinds of things I teach, and the way that I teach. I have a lot less emphasis on visual things. I have a lot more facility to be able to describe things verbally and sonically.” His experience highlights the importance of initiatives like these in creating a culture of accessibility. By sharing in their lived experience Wolek was able to create an experience that not only caters to blind and partially sighted youth, but one that belongs to them.
As Young Sound Seekers came with a five-year commitment, the grant is expected to expire in 2025. Wolek is currently “in active conversation with the National Park Services about next steps.” Within his team, he expressed that, “Everyone agrees these next steps should involve teaching others what we have developed so we have been hard at work turning our activities into written lesson plans.” These lesson plans are available for access on the National Park Service Website under Exploring Sound.
