“SONIO” Soundboard Art Piece

Working with two artists, Marc S Pierre and Karen Cancino, we developed a sound based art piece. The device was 60cm square a flat surface with a grid of metal bumps and when on display, a generative sound piece would be played alongside it.

As a viewer interacted with it (by touching the metal bumps), the device would respond to electrical changes caused by the viewer's hands via audio output. By exploring and touching different combinations of bumps with both hands or having multiple people interacting simultaneously many new sounds were created.

The idea was somewhat stumbled upon by the three of us after playing with the Prynth framework and noticing that due to wiring mistakes on the electrical side with a prior project we ended up with interference that resulted in potentially amusing sounds. It soon became interesting to see what sorts of unpredictable behaviour would occur if we purposefully tweaked and probed at the electrical flaws.

We took it further and started to design a platform to try and encourage that exploratory play, which resulted in the base idea of the sound board. Due to the random nature of the interference and floating voltages, the generative sound composition was rewritten to allow any unplanned out-of-range values to drive it.

My main role during the actual construction of the device was on the hardware/electrical side.

Milling the pcbs

Working with the other two team members

Construction of the board itself

During exhibition, an animated LED strip was added to the display table as a standalone fixture. It was shown at the surrey art gallery during their influx event and during maker faire in 2017. At both events, many visitors of all ages were delighted and some even came up with their own theories on how it worked or what it was doing; one going as far as to imagine it was interacting with a person's state of mind or chakra to drive the sound.

At Influx event

Maker Faire 2017

This project is also mentioned on the prynth framework site: https://prynth.github.io/instruments/soundboard/