The Green-Wood Cemetery is not just a traditional home for the dead, but a vibrant living space to connect with nature and culture. Local musician Gelsey Bell offers visitors a guided immersion in Brooklyn’s oldest and largest necropolis through her soundwalk Cairns, available for download on Bandcamp. 

Beneath light, angelic singing, I was ushered into the cemetery through a tunnel at the southwest corner. Bell’s use of trees and gravestones as landmarks was so clear that I never had to consult the map. Rather than a soundtrack to the cemetery’s scenery, she provides an intimate narration accompanied by ambient music and nature sounds, and shares a coherent vision of what the cemetery means to her, with particular attention to its art and ecology as well as its women and non-white “permanent residents.”

I was introduced to Do-Hum-Mee, daughter of a Sauk tribe chief who danced at the American Museum in Manhattan in 1843, and Eunice Foote, who published research on climate change long before it was widely accepted. I learned how Foote’s neighboring son-in-law sponsored the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, with just enough loopholes to maintain systemic racism. 

The walk was sprinkled with Bell’s singing, humming and wordless chants in gentle layers of harmony. Chimes, zithers, banjo-like strings, bagpipe drones, industrial echoes, even cooing dove sounds—entered the mix with seamless subtlety. The music verged on dissonant but never quite became unsettling, provoking calm contemplation rather than particular emotions.

I often couldn’t distinguish if the chirping birds I heard came from the recording or the trees around me, which I believe was Bell’s intention: to immerse the walker not in her soundscape, but the cemetery’s. As we climbed past a lake, footsteps and panting grew in volume, joined by a low electronic whir at the summit to create an out-of-body effect that started from my own breathing.

The theme of active engagement is captured in the soundwalk’s title: a Cairn is a group of stones placed as an offering on a headstone. The most popular cairn we encountered was the grave of 1980s neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, which Bell describes as a living site of ongoing artistic exchange. Sure enough, I looked back at a photo from when I first discovered Basquiat’s grave last summer, and its adorning trinkets were entirely different this time around.

At one point, Bell asked listeners to pause the recording and take in all the surrounding sounds for a few minutes. Sinking into the grass and closing my eyes, I noticed the distant roar of steady car traffic, rustling leaves, and bird songs on this windy day. I also smelled sweet early spring blossoms, cut grass, and wet earth, until my nose was hit by the pungent smell of weed smoke. Getting up to resume the walk, I spotted the source billowing out the open window of a Tesla Cybertruck parked nearby. Is nothing sacred?

Bell likened the knot in a passing tree to “an eye watching us short-lived meat bags the way we watch hummingbirds.” Humming at 220 hz–the pitch trees have been found to emit–crept into my headphones, blending with clacking, vibrato human murmuring, and keyboards. The humming transformed into a trickle as Bell explained how the water moving up a tree’s trunk can be heard with a stethoscope. “I want to speak with the electric pulses and sugar water,” she mused. 

The narration is peppered with quirk and mischief. Bell directed my attention to Sidney Bernstein, the music promoter who booked the Beatles’ legendary 1965 Shea Stadium concert. The foot of his grave encourages visitors to have an egg cream. Only a few yards after crossing through a horseshoe formation of illegible graves was I told this was the Roosevelt family plot, which includes Teddy’s parents and first wife. The only time the walk lost focus was when Bell talked about nearby graves that weren’t on the tour. Why not just lead us there if they’re worth mentioning?

The walk ended at the grave of Susan S. McKinney Stewart, the 3rd certified Black doctor in the U.S. and 1st in New York state, where Bell left her stone offering. Ethereal humming filled the air as she sat to rest and encouraged me to find my own way back. 

I found my way out of the cemetery feeling calm, enlightened, and in good company.