Bloc Jam presented at MUTEK 2010

Client: Melissa Mongiat & Mouna Andraos, for Mutek.
Period: June 2010
Technologies & Skills used : MaxMsp, Audio Consulting, Sound Design

For Mutek 2010, Melissa Mongiat & Mounia Andraos were mandated to build an interactive architectural projection installation for Montreal art downtown, Place Des Arts.
The idea was to build a step sequencer that would be projected on a building, people would then be able to call a number and interact with it, filling the blocks of the sequencer and then listening to the resulting melody. Many players could interact at the same time with it, making music together in a public space, with their own phones.

They asked me to take of the sound design of the installation, meaning I had to produce the sets of sounds sequenced by the Bloc Jam installation. I also had to procude jingles for the voice server interaction.

Even tho the final sequencer was built in Flash (ActionScript3), I was asked to build multiple prototypes of the sequencer in Max/Msp for Melissa and Mounia to study how the public would interact with the installation. Many solutions were « envisagées », because it was quite a challenge to find an intuitive way to interact with a phone through a automated touchtone server, it had to work with any phone, so we could not use any sort of « app » for modern smartphones.

For me, another challenge was to produce sounds that would sound reasonably good through the phone, where the sound is encoded in 8khz, 16bits.
My first idea was to prodube percussive sounds to allow people to build beats with the installation, since Mutek is a festival about electronic music it was making sense. But after a lot of tests and debates, I was asked to find more airy, bell-style & pure sines sounds, that would be used to build melody instead of beats, that was the designers final choice.