Laughter and Tears was a surround-sound installation that used the Pritzker Pavilion's state-of-the-art sound system in a unique way, creating a fluid, highly evocative sonic architecture within the Pavilion's lattice-covered lawn. Starting with recordings of laughter from a variety of sources, including improvising vocalists, anonymous audiences, and ordinary citizens, Chicago composers Olivia Block and Joseph Mills employed numerous electronic and acoustic techniques to transform and structure these sounds into a coherent musical form that explored laughter in all its range and nuance, from the comic to the devious. Sound artist Lou Mallozzi will worked with the composers to shape this composition into a surround-sound format intended as an immersive installation environment, a sonic architecture superimposed onto the material architecture of the Pavilion. Laughter and Tears was commissioned and presented by Experimental Sound Studio, and ran continuously November 4 and 5, 2011, from 10AM to 10PM. It was a follow-up to ESS’s enormously successful Train Time, which was presented at the Pavilion in fall of 2009. The piece was presented in partnership with the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture and is scheduled to coincide with the Sound Art Theories Symposium organized by the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.