What is a Sound Garden?

The Restorative Sound Garden is a collaboration between Caponi Art Park and composer and NeuroArtist JG Everest. Grounded in the emerging field of NeuroArts, the project brings together the three pillars of Caponi Art Park’s mission: art, nature, and wellbeing and explores how art and nature can support the brain, body, and overall wellbeing. A recent MinnPost feature explores the vision behind the project in more depth: Hey Minnesotans, want a wellness boost? Seek out a Sound Garden.

The long-term goal is a permanent Sound Garden at Caponi Art Park that functions as both a public artwork and a community space for reflection, connection, and discovery. With more NeuroArts research, the Sound Garden may offer a new approach to healing, recovery, and connection that uses art, nature, and brain science as an alternative to pharmaceutical and screen / tech-based treatments.

What is a Sound Garden?

JG Everest has placed 30 independent speakers throughout the wooded landscape. Each speaker plays a different element of a larger composition that he created and spatially arranged specifically for the site’s trails and terrain.

There is no single listening point. As you walk, what you hear changes based on where you are and as the composition interacts with the existing sounds of birds, wind, trees, and activity in the park. The result is a unique experience shaped by music, movement, nature, and place.

Years in the Making

JG Everest first brought his Sound Gardens to Caponi Art Park in 2019. During that installation, Caponi Art Park Executive Director Cheryl Caponi recognized the potential for a permanent Sound Garden within the park’s wooded trails.

Since then, the idea has developed through years of Sound Garden installations, research, experimentation, and collaboration, including a larger-scale installation at Caponi in 2024.

The 2026 prototype is the first phase of the Restorative Sound Garden initiative, offering visitors an opportunity to experience the concept as the team works toward realizing its full potential.

Meet the Collaborators

The project brings together perspectives from music and art, neuroscience, landscape architecture, nature, and community wellbeing.

JG Everest | Composer and NeuroArtist | Artistic Director, Wavelets Creative

Zeynep Başgöze, PhD | Neuroscience researcher and faculty at the Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota

Cheryl Caponi | Co-Founder and Director, Caponi Art Park

Lindsay Buck | Artist & Landscape Architect, Tree & Table

 Sound Garden at Caponi
September 12 – 26, 2026
Open daily from noon – 4:00 PM.
Featured live performances on Sept 12, 20, and 26. 

We are thrilled to host composer and director JG Everest’s newly installed “Sound Garden” sound sculpture in our new Oak Savannah Restoration area on the north side of the park.

The Restorative Sound Garden is a temporary sound installation that accompanies the existing natural soundscape (birds, insects, wind through the trees, etc) and immerses listeners in spatially composed music, played through 30 speakers, each playing a different part of the whole “Symphony”.  Every step, every turn of the head, results in a different mix and orientation of the music. The featured music will change on different days throughout the 2 weeks of the Art Block Festival, so return visits are encouraged.

The Sound Garden is self-guided and durational, offering visitors a chance to move through at their own pace, and spend as much or as little time as they choose. The longer a listener spends in the Sound Garden, the more their ears adjust to the spatial scale and dimensions of the music, and the more deeply their nervous system is affected.

In addition to the sound installation will be added layers of site-specific poetry, natural sculptures, and live performance, created through free outdoor Art + Nature workshops onsite at the park. (see below) Workshops are free, but with limited capacity, so registration is required.

The Sound Garden At Caponi Is Made Possible By: