Nathan Towles and Evan Reynolds: Synesthesia Project

The goal of this project is to create an immersive, live, musical performance piece that provides the means to not only engage an audience’s auditory senses, in the traditional manner through the sounds, but also their visual senses through tightly-coupled, vibrant, visual displays.

The design of Synesthesia was inspired by a combination from multiple Makers’ smaller builds found on the internet, but many of the modular hardware design ideas stem directly from a Makers’ blog, where he does very large installations. The concepts of the individual displays being modular lend Synesthesia the capability of having diverse arrangements of panels.

Some tools used:

External Midi Input
Ableton Live 9 Suite Max 6 VIZZable2
Syphon Mad Mapper
Octo2811 Library
Synesthesia Speakers

SYNESTHESIA creates different geometrical presentation environments. The individual panels are all built off of the same shadowbox case. There are two different types of 12” x 12” panels one being a diffuse LED panel, and the other an infinity mirror.

The infinity mirrors are a great visual medium because they add an element of depth. Both the mirrors and the diffuser panels are very simple to build. For the mirrors, you just need to apply a film to the front glass of the shadow box to allow it to be a one-way mirror, attach the continuous LED strip around the inside circumference of the box, and then glue a 12” x 12” mirror tile into the back of the box.

PDF Document: Download Synesthesia’s PDF Guide.