n the installation: ‘Solenoid Pulses’ I attached to swolenoids to an electric guitar from an Arduino board. The guitar’s output goes to an amplifier. The code of the arduino triggers solenoids in looping rhythms. Towards the end of the final loop the rhythm slows down a lot and than the cycle of loops begin again. After creating these rhythms I connected the output of the amplifier to a sound card and recorded the pulses. The pulses became a grid for a soundscape that I created using a traditional DAW (logic pro).

The soundscape itself has a minimalist approach. As the piece extended I started adding various sounds on the pulses. I used a gate to trigger these sounds with side chaining. Whenever there is a pulse short samples of sounds such as bubbles, footsteps and speech consonants are triggered. What interested me was to explore the border of perception between very short and longer sounds: in other words, what is the threshold that takes us to recognize a sound. This aesthetic and technique is widely used in music concrete, however the combination of the loops adds a minimal approach. Thus the soundscape combines two genres that are somewhat contradictory to each other.
In the installation I used a MaxMsp patch in conjunction with the Arduino board. A proximity sensor that is connected to the Arduino board triggers a toggle in max. The toggle is connected to a sampler and this starts triggering the soundscape. After 60 seconds the piece stops playing. Whenever a person is close enough to the proximity sensor the soundscape is played from the place it stopped.