Created by PanGenerator for the MDF Festival by the Philharmonic of Szczecin, Noise Surround System subversively confront the audience with the noisy city soundscape within a context of a space thats associated with drastically different sound experience. By creating such unexpected situation the project hopes to bring public attention to the issue of noise pollution and spark of public debate amongst the philharmonic audience.
Measuring of 4.5m in height and about 7m of diameter, Noise Surround System allows the audience to get surrounded by the spatialised audio emitted from the 8 motorised trolleys engineered from electric skateboards for the purpose of this project. The audiovisual choreography is driven by Node.js that remotely controls the light, sound and movement. Sound design includes sounds sampled from the noisiest parts of Szczecin transformed in realtime using dedicated Pure Data audio patch – controlling the playback in sync with movement and light emitted by the trolleys.
Hardware
Custom tracks and trolleys design – based on BLDC motor from the electric skateboard, controlled over wifi via Raspberry Pi pico W running Micropython.
Custom main board for power management / BLDC control based on STM microcontroller running C.
Each trolley is battery powered and the battery is recharged using a bit crazy servo-based “pantograph” device.
Software
Custom control software build using Node.js/Electron.
8-channel sound generated in realtime with the sync with motion via custom Pure Data patch (that in part used real recordings of city noises).
Sound is transmitted wirelessly trough in-ear monitor and played back via builtin speaker in each of the trolleys.
Credits:
panGenerator: Jakub Koźniewski, Krzysztof Cybulski, Krzysztof Goliński – concept, design & production
Krzysztof Chrzanowski – construction & mechanical engineering
Grzegorz “Farad” Pietrzyk – electronics engineering
LS Project – on-site construction setup
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Commissioned by Szczecin Philharmonic
Patron of the project – Respect Energy S.A
Photos by Maciej Jędrzejewski
