Resonate

At first glance, Resonate appears to be a static, glowing, string structure in a dark, drone-filled room. But enter the space and pluck any of the glowing strings and dynamic pools of light suddenly appear, as sound objects form a rhythmic and spatial counterpart to the drones.

 

The interactive light and sound installation was designed and built by sound-art composition students from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, and interior design students from the University of Applied Sciences, Mainz. Premiered at Luminale 2012, one of Europe’s most prominent architecture and design festivals, Resonate was experienced for the first time in the forty-metre-long interior of a container boat on the Rhine River in Frankfurt’s city centre.

 

Eight structures made from several kilometres of elastic strings and 1,600 video-enabled LEDs make up the interactive surface in Resonate. Rhythm and variance, as in music, are essential components of the installation: when the strings are plucked, the vibration (rhythm) and tension (variance) of the string changes, thus generating signals for the light and sound.

 

The sound component of the installation uses two layers of audio—the drone layer, a tightly-knit sonic weave that moves through the space as an eight-channel sound projection; and sound objects, sound samples of traditional instruments and sounds, recorded in and around the exhibition space, that have been grouped and assigned to individual speakers within each specific string structure.

 

The resulting spatial construct changes constantly and allows the participant to experience Resonate as an interactive multidimensional sonic experience.