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Sonic Pixels v1

November 14, 2017

Sonic Pixels v1 is an interactive sonic art installation – an array of up to 25 autonomous, wirelessly-controlled speakers/audio playback units and the software control system to drive them.

Imagine being a listener at the heart of a dynamic dawn chorus of bird song; the creaks and groans of a haunted house; or a Noise Orchestra curated sound palette of electromagnetic recordings, bat detectors and noise experiments on an MS-20.

What if these sonic experiences were created not through the conventional medium of surround sound – but rather through a matrix of 25 remote-controlled, mini-speakers arranged in a regular grid – like pixels on a screen.

Like pixels on a screen, this system allows us to ‘draw’, ‘paint’ and ‘animate’ with sound – to create sonic equivalents of brightness, colour and texture. Not via a carefully pre-arranged multi-channel audio composition, but through an intuitive, custom-coded iPad interface that allows for real-time, wireless triggering of each speaker – each ‘sonic pixel’ within the grid.”

It was developed for Cornbrook Creative’s ‘A Grand Exposition’ event at Talbot Mill, Manchester, UK, 26-29 Oct 2017 as a mini-commission for Manchester Science Festival 2017 – with additional support from Arts Council England as a part of a successful Grants for the Arts application for the event overall. The project was a collaboration between Cornbrook Creative (of which I was a core member) and artist, musician and educator James Medd (then Technical Manager at Barclays Salford Eagle Labs).

Mounted into an ~130mm [h] x110mm [od] clear acrylic tube, each unit integrates:

  • a full-range 4” speaker;
  • a 3W audio amplifier module, DFPlayer MP3 module and a BBC micro::bit mounted on a custom-made PCB;
  • a couple of RGB LEDs;
  • a 5200 mAH battery pack.

The control system includes:

  • a custom-coded iPad interface integrating elements from the NexusUI 2.0 collection of HTML5 interfaces and Javascript helper functions;
  • custom-coded ’middleware’ in MaxMSP and Python that receives the iPad inputs and translates them into a series of messages that are then sent via RF from a ‘master’ BBC micro:bit to the ‘slave’ BBC micro:bits in each unit.

Sonic Pixels was intended as an ‘art-technology toolkit’ – an innovative, adaptable and extendable creative technology system that shows great potential for creative application in diverse settings.

A documentation video about the project, filmed and edited by Paul Wilshaw for Eagle Labs TV, below.