Sound Boxes: Powered by littleBits: an interactive audio installation where observers can directly trigger notes by moving and waving their arms through space. This piece offers direct control of the sound sculptures to the viewers, enabling participants to collaboratively produce tones and music. Workshop will be held on July 18th on Governors Island.
Installation opening from June 10 2015
Building 5a5b, Nolan Park Governors Island
“Sound Box Installations” is a catch-all name for a series of electroacoustic sculptures and performance instruments that the artist has designed over the past several months. A “sound box” is a resonating wooden chamber. Instrument designers have used these for millenia, building sound boxes into the bodies of guitars, violins, cellos, zithers, etc. The artist’s sound box installations use these traditional instruments as a baseline model: the sculptures designed are also resonating wooden boxes, with vibrating metal strings. The difference is that there is designed circuitry to vibrate the strings with electromagnets, enabling control of the instruments with electronics. The artist uses electronics to control the sounds made by the sculpture, thereby enabling user interaction to generate the sounds. The most recent sound boxes include: Sound Boxes: Powered by littleBits: an interactive audio installation where observers can directly trigger notes by moving and waving their arms through space. This piece offers direct control of the sound sculptures to the viewers, enabling participants to collaboratively produce tones and music.
BIO
MJ Caselden is a creative technologist, sound designer, and electronic musician. Trained as a both a musician and engineer, MJ explores new ways to control sound, incorporating custom interactive instruments and software.
He started making electronic music in 2005, and went to Berklee College of Music for a B. M. in Electronic Production and Design in 2006. While living in Boston at Berklee, he began experimenting with electronics, both hacking toys and synthesizers, and designing his own circuits and software to generate sounds in new interesting ways. He began to re-design the tools that he used to make music, and then use those new tools to produce new, innovative sounds. As he moved further into electronics, he moved to University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There, he received a second bachelor’s degree, a B. S. in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in DSP. All along the way, he has dedicated time to creative projects, drawing on his deeper technical background to help artists bring their ideas into fruition and also to develop his own personal artistic goals.