Motivation

This project is a collaboration with friend and artist M. Hassak to build an interactive installation with the hope to offer a unique way of exploring cities with sounds.

This work is intended to make everyone aware of the importance of the ephemeral sounds of cities, and the danger of their extinction through social interventions, urban renewal, economic revitalization, and political decisions.

Overview

The controller board is a custom made PCB with the Atmega328p microcontroller onboard, digital inputs from control switches are multiplexed and sampled at a fixed rate. Each switch has also its own status LED. The controller monitors any changes in digital inputs or potentiometer readings and notifies the server through the serial port.

The server is a C++ program running on Raspberry Pi, that is responsible for reading and interpreting the inputs from the controller. The server will play or pause each loop instantly when the user triggers the corresponding switch, and apply a filter to a loop (or a group of loops) when its corresponding potentiometer is turned.
The behavior of the server can be configured using a JSON file, the artist was able to experiment with different combination of sounds and filters.

Build video