the wall of sound by panGenerator makes electronic music from your voice

warsaw-based collective, panGenerator, presents their latest project that fuses a public art installation with music. ‘the wall of sound’ invites audiences to interact with the piece by recording their own voice and playing the sound back in countless variations. commissioned by katowice street art 2019: urban sound, the project effectively creates an experiment to see how people interact with the installation, bringing it to life with new voices and new sequences.

all images courtesy of panGenerator

in its form, the wall of sound makes reference to graffiti art. however, rather than a static piece, panGenerator has added a system of interaction, light and sound. samplers and sequencers in the hexagonal node modules – the main component of the setup – allows sound to be recorded and played, and thanks to the numerous links between the nodes, many variations are possible from just one person’s voice. the open dialogue with the audience brings the installation to life, saturates it with meaning and allows it to evolve day by day constantly bringing new voices and new sequences into the mix.

to create the piece, panGenerator designed custom pcb’s based around popular atmega 328 (nodes) / attinny (links) microcontrollers and some cheap sound recording / playback chips that are giving the whole thing a lo-fi vibe. each module is independent and there is no central control of the whole setup – only the power needs to be supplied for every nth module, each node can trigger its neighbour pointed by the orientation of the rotary encoder. such approach allows for potentially limitless amount of nodes and huge flexibility in terms of the layout of installation. the sound recording chip could potentially be easily replaced with custom sound generator, so some other variants sound-wise should be possible in the future.

project info:

project name: the wall of sound

design: panGenerator

designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: lynne myers | designboom