[Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company]
I’m sitting on a sofa in a Bushwick, Brooklyn, studio, surrounded by 39 speakers. Some are hitched to the ceiling, others perched on four-foot-tall stands and arranged in a semi-circle. It’s dead silent, except for the occasional rumble of a truck passing by. But soon, the room wakes up.
Dave Rife and Gabe Liberti, cofounders of the interactive design studio Dave & Gabe, are playing me a musical composition they designed. I say designed, and not wrote, because it’s actually an algorithm that’s mixing the electronic sounds–a low drone, chimes, chirping birds, and trickling water–in real time. The program takes a set of notes and tones that Dave & Gabe predetermined; feeds it into a series of synthesizers, sound generators, and sequencers; then routes it to specific speakers, creating the illusion of 3D space sculpted through sound. Momentarily, I didn’t feel like I was in industrial Brooklyn, but in some Narnia-esque landscape
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Source: CO.DESIGN