Anyone who has strolled past Doug Hollis' mysteriously whistling "Sound Garden" in Magnusson Park — which inspired the name of the famous Seattle rock band — knows visual art and music make a lovely mix.

Seattle is awash the next few weeks in "sound art," as this hybrid genre is sometimes called. Bumbershoot's "In Resonance," a group show of heavy hitters curated by local musicians Fionn Meade and Robert Millis, opens Tuesday at Seattle Center's Rainier Room, and runs through Sept. 5.

"In Resonance" also involves three satellite locations: On the Boards showcases three of the show's artists (and one guest) at 8 p.m. Tuesday ($10, 206-217-9888); the same day, the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) opens a sound-art installation by Steve Peters and Christine Wallers, "Alchemy," which runs through Oct. 9 (free-$5, 206-728-1980); and at 7 p.m. Thursday the Henry Art Gallery presents a forum featuring "In Resonance" artists and sound-art scholar Christoph Cox (free, 206-543-2280).

At Bumbershoot, the Seattle-based field-recording group, The Phonographers Union, will record and mix sound at the show and produce limited-edition CDs for the exhibition catalog.

Over at Jack Straw, in the University District, Rene Yung's Buddhist-inspired installation, "The Four Dignities," harbors environmental sounds by award-winning composer Janice Giteck,(free, 206-634-0919). And tomorrow and Sunday at Camp Long, in West Seattle, the Nature Consortium's popular Arts-in-Nature Festival returns with an outdoor "museum of sound," as well as local avant-garde sound artists violinist Eyvind Kang, field recordist Susie Kozawa and guitarist Bill Horist. Hours are 11 a.m.-9 p.m. tomorrow and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday ($5-$10, 206-923-0853).

Though sound art has roots in the 20th-century avant garde, the form really is as old as the phonograph itself, which, as Cox points out in his "In Resonance" program note, transformed sound from something "temporal, fleeting into a spatially existing thing."

That connection to vintage recording is highlighted by Seattle's Climax Golden Twins — a duo comprised of co-curator Millis and Jeffery Taylor — in their use of rare, home-made acetate recordings made by ordinary folks in the Depression era as a sort of aural postcard.

Steve Roden, whose work recently appeared in a spectacular, comprehensive sound-art show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, is fascinated by the first words uttered from space by astronaut John Glenn, in 1972. Roden's "Transmissions (Voices of Objects and Skies)" is a sculpture made of wire-hung tin cans that broadcast recordings from satellites recorded by amateur astronomers.

Another famous sound artist, turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, was commissioned by "In Resonance" to create "As Now, Is Now," a piece that combines expanding and contracting bands of light projected over Super 8 film footage, which are then interpreted by live musicians as a written score.

Rosenfeld, Roden, San Franciscan Jim Haynes and Kang all perform Tuesday at On the Boards.

Stephen Vitiello, known for his "World Trade Center Recordings; Winds After Hurricane Floyd, 1999-2002," offers "Fear of High Places and Natural Things," which uses subsonic sound to make suspended speakers sway.

The other "In Resonance" artists are veterans Toshiya Tsunoda and Thurston Moore (of the band Sonic Youth) and regional artists Jesse Paul Miller and Jennifer West.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com