Production Overview
Music Impossible was a sound and light installation at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow, UK: funded by Glasgow Arts as part of Family Fun Week, a series of exhibits, installations, and performances. The goal was to make an interactive experience for young people to enjoy as a part of the cultural festival. The design team decided to make a hallway with shafts of light like large laser beams, that when interrupted would trigger the playback of a sound. Each of the eight light beams and their accompanying light-dependent resistors fed data into an Arduino, which triggered a Max/MSP patch that would play a sound file from the associated sample bank in the speaker it was assigned to. When the analog pin registered a level above the ambient light level in the room, but below the direct focus of the beam of light, it started playback. If the beam was still broken after completing the soundfile, it then played that same file backwards at half speed, before pulling another sample from the bank if the beam was still interrupted. This allowed for an incredibly responsive system with rules that are easy to explore the bounds of, and with sample banks of over a hundred 3-7 second long clips for each beam in the installation, there was more than enough variance in the system to make the exact rules difficult to distinguish. This kept the experience compelling and novel.