Sonic Sphere

The Sonic Sphere KA9 was a 14-meter geodesic structure designed for the Burning Man festival in 2022. This innovative installation featured 52 JBL speakers spherically placed to create a fully immersive audio experience. Based on Karl Stauckhausen's original Kugelauditorium, an almost spherical spatialized sound auditorium created for the 1970 World Fair in Osaka, Principal Artist, Entrepeneure, and Philosopher Ed Cooke continued iterating through multiple versions of the Kugel Auditorium (KA), building up to the KA9 and the first publicly shared exhibition.

The spherical design aimed to envelop participants in sound, allowing them to relax into a fully immersive audio experience while suspended in a net 10 meters above the ground. The soundscapes, curated by sonic artist Merijn Royaards, amazing artists and albums into a new understanding through manipulating states of consciousness from changed expectations.

Building the sphere required careful planning and engineering to ensure optimal sound distribution and structural integrity, making it a standout feature of the festival.

The lighting component of the Sphere has been a critical part of the artistic expression of the potential of the space.

Stephane Lee took up the software lead role to develop a system that could drive the LEDs over the artnet protocol. While the lighting engineering team designed and built the physical fixtures, it was up to Stephane and myself to get the correct data to the LEDs, mapping 120 individually addressible LEDs to each fixture, allowing for different textures, such as radial sweeps vs whole fixture color. The fixtures were then covered with cloth to diffuse the light and provide smoothing of the individual LEDs.

Stephane built the original engine using C++, to which I supported fixture connections, artnet processing, and configurable mapping for the spatial positions of each fixture on the physical structure.
Once we had the fundamentals in place, we started playing with the LED patterns, trying to find the best ways to read in the spatialized audio and drive the patterns accordingly. By this time, we were already on playa, and were hacking out new content on laptops while sitting in the blowing dust.

We eventually came to shift the core LED processing engine to use Mark Slee's amazing Chromatik interface, which I have previously used on other projects. This dramatically simplified the addition of external signal to modify the LED pattern state, as we got working for the KA11 @ The Shed in NYC.

Working on the Sonic Sphere KA9 was an exhilarating experience. The challenge of integrating technology with art pushed the boundaries of what is possible in immersive environments.

Working with a fast, nimble, and super-competent team across art, fundraising, structural engineering, sound engineering, power engineering, electrical engineering, and lighting engineering was such a deep honor and pleasure.

• Helped develop LED control software with Stephane Lee

• Scaled the 30m sphere to manually test each of the mounted lighting fixtures for data and power. Sometimes in 25 mph dust-filled winds (it was fun!)

• Designed stunning LED patterns visible to 80,000 participants kilometers away

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