Parsons The New School for Design: Sound Affects

A pioneer in art and design education since 1896, Parsons The New School for Design was looking for a way to start a conversation about design today. While most people view design as a purely visual or aesthetic endeavor, design today is a holistic problem-solving process capable of tackling some of the world's biggest challenges. 

SoundAffects was an interactive experience taking the everyday events of a New York city block ranging from weather and traffic to people walking and talking on their phones, and transforming them into a real-time musical soundtrack. We created a “sound wall” that generated a real-time musical and visual interpretation of a New York city block. Listeners could plug their headphones directly into the wall or listen and watch online. We used Twitter to alert people about interesting events influencing the music, including our own experiments aimed at disrupting natural city flow.