Syzygryd is a town square for the collaborative creation of music. It’s a public space, it’s a sculpture, and it’s a professional musical instrument. It’s the most beautiful expression we can imagine of the joy we take in community, music, technology, fire, sculpture and architecture.

Three large custom hardware grid sequencers. Each controls a single instrument and they share a clock, so they’re all synchronized. By controlling time, pitch, and harmony, these devices make it easy for people with no musical training or talent to create melodious compositions.

The consoles are arranged at three equidistant points around a 60′ diameter circle, far enough apart that the participants can see one another but can’t communicate verbally. Each console reflects the state of the others. Three people collaboratively create a continuously evolving piece of music without communicating, except through the music itself.

The center of the circle is a huge metal tornado of cubes, pulsing with synchronized sound, light, and fire.

There were various software components of Syzygryd that were custom designed.  The sequencer component was originally prototyped using Processing, but after various latency issues was rewritten by Matt Sonic using the JUCE framework.  However the controller software continued to be developed in Processing since a majority of graphics work was already written in it.  I had contributed optimizations in the load time and memory overhead with the program in addition to some general tweaking here and there.  The Modulators represented various devices that could operate with OSC and speak with our specification.  Primarily, we used an iPad and iPod Touches to control things on the sculpture such as light control, fire control and set switching.  Light control software took “cues” based on timing and positional cues.  A majority of the lighting code was surprisingly written during the initial run of the sculpture.

Ableton Live and AU Lab were the two large components of how the Mix Engine worked for Syzygryd.  An AU Lab Configuration was created to time-align individual platform monitors with the main speaker cluster at the center of Syzygryd.  It also provided basic filtering and processing for the monitors and main cluster.  Pre-processing of outputted signal from Ableton was accomplished through the use of an ADAT loopback.  Ableton would output signal on digital ADAT outputs, which returned back to the computer through ADAT inputs.  DSP would then be applied and outputted again through analog outputs.  Since the system was time-aligned, minimal latency was observed.

Despite our efforts to create effective mix standards for musicians on the project, we still encountered issues with sets that would sound too soft or were overdriven.  Thus, it eventually became necessary to do a majority of “mixing” on the fly.  This again was accomplished through AU Lab in order to avoid interfering with automation within Live sets.

Set switching was also accomplished through custom software that was originally planned to take advantage of Python integration with Ableton Live, but changed over to triggered AppleScripts.  This proved to be mostly effective and required minimal intervention during the run.  Issues would only arise when sets that required large amounts of memory for samples would become involved.

Contributions

• Sound Design
• Sound System and Mix Engine Design
• Sequencer Prototyping and Controller Display Tweaks
• Physical Fabrication