Acousmatic box

This work presents a prototype acousmatic device that uses micro:bit’s capabilities to generate sound according to the amount of light detected by its sensors. It becomes an interactive experience involving at least two participants, who produce different sounds by altering the light received by the micro:bit LED array. It emulates a theremin, but instead of measuring distance with an ultrasonic sensor, it responds to the amount of light detected by the LEDs.

Sound has always occupied an important place among my artistic interests, and I want to explore the acousmatic field progressively in greater depth, although I have already made several earlier forays into it.

Heir to musique concrète, electronic music, electroacoustic music and related traditions, acousmatic practice plays with sonic abstraction and calls for active, attentive listening. In an acousmatic work we do not see the source that produces the sound; we see only the loudspeakers, because the source lies outside the visual field. Such sounds have particular potential because how we categorise them depends on how we listen. They remain open to personal association with familiar sonic stimuli; at times we may be unable to relate them to anything known, while at others the connection may exist only on an emotional level.

In a performance of acousmatic music there is only the audience and the loudspeakers: the performer-composer is no longer physically present. The artist normally assembles the work beforehand and it is presented at a later point, in that sense somewhat like cinema. The listener hears a sound without seeing its source and is free to interpret it through their own experience of sound.

It demands highly active listening because the listener is confronted with a mirror of the self: their inner imagery, memory, experience and associations.

For this piece I chose to create a black box, making use of the symbolism the form itself carries within acousmatic practice. One person places their head inside the box, where everything is dark, and hears sounds generated by the micro:bit through headphones connected to it.

Crucially, the sounds that person hears are not the result of their own decisions — reinforcing the acousmatic element — but depend on the participants outside. They encounter someone with their head inside a black box from which only the micro:bit display is visible; the display invites them to give it more or less light, thereby changing another person’s experience.

The micro:bit is programmed to emit different sounds according to the level of light detected by its sensors. Bringing more or less light towards them changes the sound, so the experience ultimately depends on the decisions made by the people outside and on how much light they choose to provide.

The micro:bit display sends those outside the message: “Your light and dark shapes my world, do you dare?” As well as suggesting what they can do, the phrase makes explicit the effect one person’s decisions have on another, symbolically foregrounding dynamics that lie at the heart of human relationships.