Humans are, by and large, visual creatures. Except those of us who are blind or visually impaired, we orient ourselves to our surroundings primarily through our sense of sight. Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett temporarily upend that experience of the world by creating an event focused exclusively on what the audience can hear.
Hoff, 46, and Harnett, 40, spent years working as staffers and freelance audio producers in public radio, adding sound to stories told mostly through words. Together they’ve won two Edward R. Murrow Awards and were featured regularly on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” “Science Friday” and other nationally syndicated programs.
Then, about a decade ago, they left public radio to create an in-person event — and, when public gatherings were verboten during the pandemic, a podcast called “Ways of Knowing” — in which the soundscape becomes the main character. The goal wasn’t to use ambient sounds to support or enhance spoken stories; the sounds themselves are the stories.
This week, Hoff and Harnett, who describe themselves not as artists or journalists but “curators,” bring the latest installment of their project, “The World According to Sound: Ways of Knowing,” to Middlebury College, part of a nationwide tour of 34 colleges and universities. During the free, 80-minute event, audience members sit in total darkness wearing eye masks and are transported on a sonic voyage. Surrounded by six high-end loudspeakers and two massive subwoofers, people will hear unique and unusual sounds captured over the past century, either mined from audio archives or recorded by Hoff, Harnett and others. Those sounds include the footsteps of ants, the interiors of a waterfall and a sand dune, a bubbling geothermal hot pot, and a choir singing in the nave of a sixth-century cathedral.
“The holy grail for us is a sound … [that gets] a lot of reaction to it,” said Harnett, a Middlebury College graduate. “As a culture, we pay way more attention to what we see versus what we hear. This whole show is asking you to reimagine the world through your ears instead of your eyes.”
“The World According to Sound” encourages listeners to get lost in their own thoughts, feelings and imaginations. Hoff and Harnett provide only limited narration about the identity of each sound and when and where it was recorded.
“We’ve done the show four times in the last week,” Harnett said in a recent phone interview, “and I’m constantly surprised by the different reactions and ideas that people come up with.”
For example, one part of the event features sounds created by the cables and support columns of five bridges around the world. To some, the sounds are harsh, intense and even slightly scary. But a woman approached the creators after a show and told them the bridge section was the most beautiful part to her, because she could “really connect with the labor the bridges were doing for us,” straining and groaning under the weight of human traffic.
“She felt great empathy for the bridges,” Harnett said, “which is something I never would have thought of.”
The point of the show isn’t just to ask people to hyper-focus on weird, wild and rarely heard audio. As Hoff explained, these events aim to create an “act of communal listening, [which is] pretty unique in this day and age.”
Harnett recalled one 15-year-old in Massachusetts saying after the event, “‘This is the first time I can remember not multitasking.’” Harnett added. “That, to me, is the biggest point of the show: reminding people that there’s a lot of value in focusing on just one thing.”
This article appears in March 4 • 2026.
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