The Music Center Plaza

The Dream

The Music Center approached yU+Co with a wild idea:

What if we could design a set of Smart Screens for the renovation of their Plaza. What if these screens could integrate with The Music Center’s Iconic Architecture and cultural history and use interactivity to invite the public into direct participation with this Intelligent Plaza?

The Inspiration

Drawing on The Music Center’s Iconic Architecture and history as a cultural centerpiece, we wanted these screens not only to retell this story, but to work as portals that draw the public into a direct playful engagement with this new public space.

The Vision

We imagined different ways the screens could visualize architecture, people, sight, sound and play on-screen through figurative, literal and abstract representational strategies.

We devised a series of renders exploring these ideas…

The Execution

We connected 3 cameras, a LIDAR sensor, an XLR audio feed, and advanced custom software designed in TouchDesigner to create several unique genres of visual content.

Augmented Plaza - Use of Tensorflow to transform the plaza in the image of iconic paintings

Sensor Generated Art - Using camera feeds fed into GLSL Pixel Shaders to invite audience interaction

Living Archive - Real-Time Playback of Photographs from the History of The Music Center

Fountain Art - Visualizations using LIDAR Scans of the Plaza

Audio Reactive - Generative visuals driven by BPM detection and Frequency Analysis in order to create Polyrhythmic relationships between live music and on-screen imagery in real-time during Friday Night Dance Events

The Team

Agency: yU+Co

Client: The Music Center

Creative Director: Garson Yu

Producer: Robert Checchi

Lead Creative Technologist: Dylan Roscover

Lead Engineer: Andrew Burnett

Software Engineer: Allen Zihan Zhang

Creative Coder: Keshav Prasad