Sound and the

city

By Linda Schmidt

If music can soothe the savage beast perhaps it can also bring a bit of serenity to the stressed-out city dweller. 20 

M i l l s Q u a r t e r ly

With that hope in mind, experimental musician Dan Gottwald, MFA ’15, teamed up with urban designer Scott Watkins, MBA/MPP ’16, to invent ChimeSF, a unique musical public art installation. They unveiled their creation at the Market Street Prototyping Festival, which featured 50 projects intended to make San Francisco’s bustling thoroughfare more inviting, vibrant, and engaging. Gottwald and Watkins stayed on site with the instrument, situated not far from the Ferry Building and bell tower at the foot of Market Street, for most of the three-day festival in April. “People would walk up, intrigued by the aesthetics, and then they’d try to figure out how to play with it,” says Watkins. Passersby would quickly move from perplexity to discovery as they figured out the connections between chimes and hammers and levers. A wide crosssection of the city’s population was drawn to the experience—business people,