Active Prismatic Listening

#acoustic #experience #laser

Manipulate and visualise acoustics /
A collaborative installation with Bob Hoffnar and Max Lorenzen

A space is filled with a series of slowly evolving standing sound waves, creating a relaxing and minimal sound bath. With this minimal sound scape it becomes quickly apparent how the listener’s position and orientation in space determines the mix of the different perceived frequencies. Even a slight movement changes the perceived sound. Listeners become in this way active musicians creating a personal performance for themselves.

A hat on one listener’s head holds two microphones capturing the sound aura around the listener. The sound signals are then sent to a laser visualizing for everyone the shape of the listener’s perceived sound, adding another layers of visual interpretation of the acoustic properties of sound.


The space becomes a musical instrument where the location will determine what the performers and audience hear. The audience will move through the space in order to hear the sound from their personal perspective.


With this installation we encourage people to listen to sound details, thus discovering the properties of sound and acoustic of the space they’re in. It’s something we, as humans, have intuitively but use less and less in our society. In an experiential way the participants discover complex sound phenomena such as filtering, phasing, reverberation, beatings, wave cancellation.

Furthermore thanks to listening we focus people on their present moment, the place where all the good things happen allowing for a dynamic meditation, relaxation, and neural reconfiguration.

More info:

https://vimeo.com/735038961
https://vimeo.com/855804103
https://vimeo.com/855805385