From Layne Garrett’s installation “Bamboo Forest,” in which small mechanical objects are connected to single-string bamboo instruments. (Ben Tankersley)

Jocelyn Frank of the DC Listening Lounge would like to open your ears. This year, the group’s annual interactive Sound Scene graduates from the alternative art spaces where it has previously been held to a new and prestigious venue: the National Mall.

On Saturday the Hirshhorn brings the group and their love for sound to a wider audience with Sound Scene IX: Sculpting Sound, which features live music, interactive exhibits, and DIY workshops.

The DC Listening Lounge was formed in 2003. Its members come from a wide range of fields: artists, journalists, composers, collectors, nerds. The group meets monthly in members’ living rooms to share sounds, bounce around ideas, and sometimes just listen. Frank, its managing facilitator, explains that the group “is constantly evolving and changing, and it’s a collective in the truest sense of the word—it’s the members that bring their creative sensibilities and interests and excitement.”

What kinds of sounds do people share at the monthly meetings? “One of the most memorable pieces that someone shared,” Frank says, “was an audio story of someone killing a chicken for the first time and going through the motion of catching it and killing it and plucking it—the whole experience from start to finish. That was incredibly dramatic… A reporter had some audio tape that never made it to the story but it was a tangent from a little kid who went off about building a time travel machine out of a microwave. These are gems that don’t have another place to live, and the meetings are a great place for that.”

Frank comes from a journalism background, and helped develop the BBC Radio 4 program Americana. “I have always been interested in the ways that sound communicates,” she says. “All the emotion and expression that comes from communication is largely based first in sound, and then words come later. For me, the essence of a really good radio story or podcast has to do with focusing in on sound rich themes and creative use of sound to help bring a story forward.”

This is the ninth year for DCLL’s Sound Scene, which has grown from humble beginnings at Mount Pleasant’s La Casa. Each year’s event has a theme, and if this year’s theme of sculpting sound seems vague, that’s intentional. “It’s a wide-ranging event on purpose,” Frank explains. “We want people to be reminded that their ears are actively engaged in their life all the time. It’s easy to overlook them—even the word “overlook” shows that we live in a very visual culture and we have a very visual language. But there’s so much of our experience that’s heard. “

Sculpting Sound promises quite a range of aural experience from sources as different as direction speakers that you can’t hear when you walk out of their wave field, to iPads and computer speakers, to an installation that encourages visitors to build their own wind chimes. They even have a sonic version of Twister in which placing your left hand on red and your right hand on blue creates music.

Shakespeare wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on!” There’s an installation for that: vegetables are hooked up like a keyboard to different samples. A version of the memory game Simon has been hacked so that instead of memorizing a color sequence, you hold your hand above the device to play it like a Theremin.

One of the most successful pieces from last year’s event was the game Sounds Against Humanity, and it’s back this year. Developer Bobak Shafiei, who based the game on Cards Against Humanity, explains that “instead of people saying answers aloud, the game uses RFID cards that they swipe on a box that triggers a sampled sound: music, sound effects, sound bytes from various celebrities.”

This weekend, you can even sing along with the Hirshhorn’s fountain. Layne Garrett used a hydrophone (a water-friendly microphone) to create an installation that allows you to create sound from the fountain by throwing coins.

Sound Scene IX: Sculpting Sound is a participatory event that invites users to put a spin on a Metro slogan: hear something, say something.

Saturday, July 9 from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The event is free, and is suitable for all ages.

Listen to an excerpt from the piece “Framing Device,” by Jimmy Garver and Rebecca Bray: