As Lead Designer of Parallel Studios our small team created a public, interactive sound and light installation on Pioneer Square. It was up for a the weekend of June 24th - 26, 2016.

Exchange was intuitively playable as an instrument by anyone walking by. When you got close to a group of tubes they would light up brightly and a tone would play. The simplicity of the interaction led to thousands of members of the public enthusiastically playing with all weekend.

This was a 3 week sprint from concept to deployment - I was the technical lead, sole programmer and co-designer. I programmed two Teensy microcontrollers to read 18 ultrasonic rangefinder sensors - which in turn triggered sound I designed and programmed in Pure Data. I programmed light control using a third Teensy and sent DMX from Pure Data which we in turn wired to DMX relays and 72 tubes we filled with bright LED strips. I implemented the sound design in Pure Data using Karplus-Strong synthesis, and spatialized to 9 channels of audio in a circular array.

Client: Houseguest / Pioneer Courthouse Square

Date Created: June, 2016