SoundAffects is an experiential project collaboration between mono, Parsons The New School for Design and Tellart. The purpose of this ten day project is to capture real-time city data and translate this in to a musical and visualisation representation, helping us explore and think about cities in new ways.
The hub of this New York City-based project is a listening wall which is set up at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Behind this wall are a bunch of sensors tracking variables such as traffic patterns, proximity of people in the space, colour, temperature etc.
The data from these sensors is assigned to colour and sound values to create an abstract timeline-based visualisation of patterns and notes representing the ebb and flow of the city.
As well as being presented on the wall itself, the web-based visualiser can be viewed here and several one-off experiment videos can also be discovered here. For more details about how the SoundAffects project works, to find out about which sensor inputs correlate to which colors and how the visualisation and sounds are compiled and generated, have a read of the explanatory infographic below (click to enlarge).
As the project’s data capture grows, the project team are making it available to the public and you can download daily csv files to generate and share your own creations.
To follow the progress of the project follow @soundaffectsnyc and #soundaffectsnyc on Twitter.