Projects » sounds like light, lights like sound

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound

Overview

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound is an interactive immersive installation. It converts any space into a playful environment for the exploration of sound and light. With little prompting, visitors to the space find themselves dancing, moving, and ’spazzing out’ (as some said in February 2007), as their motion becomes intuitively connected to the sound they are hearing and the light they are seeing. The artwork presents an individual experience for each individual, operating a collaborative relationship between artist, technology and participant.

Winner of Best Visual Arts in the Wellington Fringe Festival 2007, Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound uses computer vision technology, open source software including PureData and OpenCV, and hand-built LED lighting controlled through a Wiring or Arduino board, to transport you to a world where your movements create subtle shifting patterns of sound and light. It responds to your movements, and it is sensitive enough in its responses that it enables a space to be played, intuitively, like a musical instrument.

(Late on a Saturday evening in early November 2007, an altered version of Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound was briefly installed on Rua da Rosa, Bairro Alto, Lisboa, Portugal. In this context the piece acted as an audiovisual augmentation to the homeward journeys of people out on the town in Lisbon, briefly lighting up the street and creating a small soundscape whenever a member of the public walked underneath it.)

Video Documentation

Watch the documentation video online: (downloads below)

Or download the video:
last updated Sunday 6th December 2009