Agile Vocalist
Agile Vocalist is a podcast about sound and the performing arts with a California connection. Explore artist stories and learn music history, get inspired, and learn about how sound and the arts impact our lives. Created and hosted by Rachel Medanic, Agile Vocalist is for the curious, the creative, and for anyone willing to explore the connection between sound and our shared humanity.
Agile Vocalist episodes, liner notes, and additional visual materials also available at: https://www.agilevocalist.com
Agile Vocalist
Visualizing Sound with Rob Jensen and Warren Trezevant, Creators of Sonic Runway
What does it take to synchronize light and sound? Co-creators Rob Jensen and Warren Trezevant, talk about their work creating Sonic Runway, an art installation conceived at Burning Man. Sonic Runway immerses the spectator in colorful synchronized visuals that animate the speed of sound.
Hear the story behind their meticulous creation process, making the exhibit first for Burning Man in 2003 and how its success grew to transform it into a traveling exhibit to sites around the U.S., England, Canada, and finally to a replicated exhibit in Chengdu China.
Listen in as we explore the myriad ways the Sonic Runway has reshaped the perception of sound for thousands of people around the world. Sonic Runway is a communal experience that has left audiences smiling, marveling and connecting with each other. Watch and listen to the Runway in action here.
More visuals and information about this episode can be found at: https://agilevocalist.com/2023/10/01/watching-sound-t…warren-trezevant/
More about Agile Vocalist, including artist biographies, liner notes and additional visual material for every episode can be found on the Agile Vocalist web site.
- Follow Agile Vocalist on IG
- Subscribe to Agile Vocalist on YouTube
- Support Agile Vocalist, a privately funded labor of love dedicated to the arts! Leave a tip here.
You know, music is largely about anticipation and then having that either surprise or, you know, having your expectation met about what that's going to be. And one of the you know, the beat drop is a powerful moment because it's the thing that's had all this build up, and then we're anticipating and then there's often a pause and then there's that moment of arrival when it finally happens and what you get with the runway is this sort of like you can peek a half a second or a second into the future and you can see it coming. And so I think that has this effect of like adding to the satisfaction of that arrival, because you now like it's more than one sense of arrival and you're kind of like that satisfaction is being met, where the pattern is being realized, kind of at the moment, all at the same moment.
Speaker 2:Rob Jensen conceived the sonic runway while observing the effects of sound at Burning man in 2002. As a visual artist, engineer and musician, rob has always been drawn to the intersection of science and art. Rob's day job also combines art and technology, where he alternates between animating and engineering. At Pixar Animation Studios, warren Trezevant enjoys creating experiences of wonder. He's brought characters to life in movies. As a former animator at Pixar Animation Studios, he also brings them to life in the real world with the stroboscopic Toy Story, zoey Trope, peter Hudson's large scale, zoey Trope's Charon and Eternal Return, as well as the breathing for Marco Cochran's Revolution. Listen to this next Agile Vocalist episode. Agile Vocalist is a podcast and blog about sound and the performing arts with a California connection. Welcome and thank you, Warren Trezevant. Did I say it correctly?
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And Rob Jensen for joining me here in this episode talking about sonic runway. Is it sonic runway or the sonic runway? How do you talk about it?
Speaker 3:I always had it just as sonic runway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, our friend. Our friend, when we built the first one, joked and said this is just a sonic runway. You could tell already there would be many.
Speaker 2:Ah, so that friend was actually telling the future with the little, with the modifier. Yeah, a little bit. When was that comment? That's an interesting comment.
Speaker 1:That was from 2003,. Which was when we built the very first iteration.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's, we're going to talk about that first iteration in a second here, so I want to invite both of you to take a turn, with your own style and flavor, to talk about the runway. How do you describe it in your own terms? What is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the sonic runway is a visualization of the speed of sound. So it converts audio in real time and builds a pattern off of that audio and then moves it down a series of arches that form a corridor at the speed of sound. So in essence you're kind of looking at sound waves moving through space.
Speaker 2:And the arch is. So the arches are metal, would you? Are they a special type of?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was kind of giving the overview. I can kind of give you more of the physical description. So our most recent installation is in San Jose, california, and it's in front of City Hall and it is 25 steel arches that are about 12 feet in diameter and they are in. The interior is ring with LEDs and so they are spaced about 18 feet apart and there's 25 of them. So it goes about 435 feet and when you're standing in the runway it creates this kind of feeling of corridor that you're in, where you can kind of get a sense of the light and the patterns made from the music.
Speaker 2:Anything you'd add or say differently? Rob about that.
Speaker 1:I think that's exactly right. It's a yeah, I don't know. I don't have anything to add at this moment.
Speaker 2:Let's have a little fun with it. If you were to take the experience of being in the runway as an analogy, what would you? What does it feel like? Does it feel at certain times like being in a white water raft on a river? Does it feel like wind in a tree that you're witnessing? Does it feel?
Speaker 3:like watching. It's a little bit of a space mountain, more than anything else, where you're on a dark roller coaster kind of going through lights.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. What about for you, rob?
Speaker 1:It's very abstract, I think it's to me. I've always I feel like I often see music when I hear it, and so this is a way of making what is otherwise invisible visible.
Speaker 2:That's very cool. And so in the past, before it came into your hands, which created its being, what would you see for music? Would you say, Was it, you know, like scenery and movies or something else?
Speaker 1:I mean, I've always been attracted to various depictions that are somewhat literal of what's going on in music. You know I grew up playing the violin and in the context of an orchestra. You're often you know you're listening very carefully to all these other parts that are happening and there's a lot of paying attention to how all the different pieces fit together. So I feel like when I, when I listen to music, I can feel it being deconstructed and presented in different ways.
Speaker 1:You know there's a long history of different forms of art, from Fantasia up through all the different music videos that are portraying you know that are tightly coupling visuals to music, and I'm attracted to the ones that are sort of like they aren't just like here's this person singing this song, but they're sort of a visual deconstruction of the audio and so the runway. I think one of the things that it does is try our hand at putting on one visualization of that sound and then, in combination, not just the sound that you're hearing right now, but also how that sound moves through space, which is something that I think is what is unique about the installation being involved in something, work yourself into the ground and forget to eat, forget to sleep, because, I mean, that's the same thing that happens in depression. No object.
Speaker 2:Rob, can you tell the story of how the idea for Sonic Runway was generated?
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, the idea was born.
Speaker 1:Warren and I have been going out to the desert to go to Burning man for many years now and we used to camp as part of you know one of the features of Burning man is there are a bunch of places that are very large-scale sound installations that usually have DJs that are playing music that goes throughout the night, and there was one afternoon when we were sitting in front of the speaker stacks. There it was me and my wife and a couple other people, and there were thumps of music coming from the DJ that were playing. And there was a woman who rode by on her bicycle she was a little distance away and she was really into the music and she dropped her bike and she started dancing and she was a really great dancer. It was clear that she was dancing very rhythmically into the beat, but from where we were sitting she was noticeably behind the beat, and so we realized of course that's because it takes a while for all these thumps that we're hearing right where we're sitting to reach where she is.
Speaker 1:So she was dancing perfectly in time, but offset, and that's a feature we're familiar with in a variety of circumstances. You're at a baseball game. You hear the crack of the bat, or you see the batter swing before you hear it. Or if you listening to Thunder Strike, you're used to waiting to figure out how far away the Thunder Clap is, but it's not something that you've ever really seen, and so we sort of have this overwhelming sense of hearing this desert environment, where it's a big flat plane, there's really a very clean movement of sound through space, and then realize it would be a perfect environment to try to create a visualization of that, of that speed moving across.
Speaker 2:That's cool and you talked earlier when we first met about the inclement environmental nature, the sand and the wind and, I would assume, the dryness or the you know the level of moisture or not in the air at Burning man. Can you say something about how it's built to address those things?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are challenges at just about every level. Trying to build an art installation at Burning man and frankly, that's, I think, part of what draws people to do it in the first place you know, you get a lot of people sort of like that seems like a sort of absurd challenge. What could we do? You know, you're off the grid, you're in this totally inhospitable place that's like ridiculously hot and dry and there's no services and anything but like what if we could do it, you know. So yeah, we got after we had this idea.
Speaker 1:You know, on top of that, when we were first building it, you know, none of us had done anything with electronics. We really kind of didn't have any idea how to build it. So we like bought a bunch of books and figured it out and got a group of friends together to basically figure out how could we construct such a thing. And so by the time it was out, you know, we'd like figured out how to rent a trencher and bury cables and solder our own custom circuit boards together and build a little low-pass filter that would detect various aspects of the music, and how to wire that into the DJ board and how to do networking and all the things you need to do in order to create a start installation. I think what Burning man provides that is pretty amazing is sort of an open canvas and invitation to build, kind of whatever you want and a deadline.
Speaker 2:And so I'm just curious when you first brought it to Burning man and its first I guess iteration is a safe word that was what year and how long did it take to mount it, to get it going?
Speaker 1:So that was 2003 when we installed the first one. It was much simpler than the current incarnation. The first version that we built was just a series of strobe lights that were mounted on top of steel pyramids. We probably worked on it for eight or nine months, kind of in our spare time with friends, kind of in our basements and various places, and then the actual construction of it on site took three or four days probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something like that. How many people involved over those three or four days?
Speaker 3:I mean, that was just the core four of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, there was a there's a, there's a core of people that are sort of deeply committed to the project, and then part of what happens at a place like Burning man is you get a lot of other people who cycle in and volunteer and help out. That's part of the joy of building such projects, is the way that it brings people together.
Speaker 3:For that iteration we attached ourselves to a sound camp. So this was a camp that was there. They had built speakers, and so there were other artists who were building the DJ booth and other artists who were building the environment and other art pieces around it. So we were a little community of people. So it was really easy for people in that community who may have been working on some of the other art pieces to come over and help us out as we built it in, because we were, as a group, trying to build this overall experience that the runway was just a part of.
Speaker 1:You know, we built this version with strobe lights back in 2003.
Speaker 1:And that was very successful, but it really all it showed was sort of the thump of the bass happening or the kick drum whenever it happened, and that works great when you're like it's the early 2000s and people are blasting trance music and it's basically like thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb you can see that rippling down on the strobe lights. Life intervened in the next decade. We had some kids each on each side and did some other art projects, but kind of set aside this idea of the Santa Conway until much later, when there was sort of an evolution of technology and also that made made, made it possible for us to build a much more interesting version of the same installation. So in 2016, we brought this fundamental concept back, but instead of just showing, instead of just a single strobe light, there were now 500 LEDs on each one of these hoops in the way that Warren was describing, and that allows a much richer visualization of the music, because we've got full color and all kinds of tricks up our sleeves to kind of paint that, paint that canvas.
Speaker 2:And so that's the current sort of iteration, from 2016 to now.
Speaker 1:Right Is the yeah there have been a few different physical manifestations of it, but the concept has been the same since then.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Okay Okay, and in the desert we're able to make it longer, because where it is in San Jose right now, you know it's in an urban environment, there's a lot of things near it, but one of the things we did for in 2016 is we were able to put it out and it's 1000 feet long and each of the hoops are about 30 feet apart, and so it's a much longer experience and you really get that sense of the sound waves traveling down the sonic runway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the speed of sound. It takes about a second for a given beat or a given sound to travel that 1000 feet. So you really have a sense. You know it has a more majestic feel at that scale.
Speaker 3:So we built the version in 2016 and then, in 2017, we were able to take that same version and put it in for as a temporary installation in San Jose so that's the same one.
Speaker 3:And then we ended up bringing it back that same one out to Burning man in 2018.
Speaker 3:And so, while the physical manifestation was the same, we improved the software and did a number of things on the technology side, but the form factor and the experience was the same.
Speaker 3:And then we were fortunate enough to discover a touring company called Krios, which is based in Montreal, and Krios tours public art, and so what they do is they find art pieces and then they take possession of them, and then what they do is they reach out to city entities or other entities that might want them and take this portfolio and show them to the cities, and then the cities can then select it for exhibition, and then Krios will go and install it, maintain it while it's up and then take it down. And this has been really great, because one of the things that we've seen emerge is this idea of kind of a winter light festival. So a lot of cities will set things up, and the runway is perfect for that, because it can go up. It's a really nice crowd pleaser, it allows people to walk through it and it really has a nice presence, and so that is what's touring and that is the one that's gone to England in cities throughout Canada and most recently it was in Ottawa in Canada, as well as in Raleigh, north Carolina.
Speaker 1:The version that's currently in San Jose. That version was not intended to be a permanent installation, but the folks at San Jose really enjoyed the piece, and so they commissioned us to fabricate a version that's intended to be a semi-permanent installation, so that one we rebuilt from the ground up, a version that was much more robust and intended to actually be self-sustaining on that site. So that's the version that's currently installed in front of San Jose.
Speaker 2:I got it, and so there's different ways of talking about this. There's permanent, semi-permanent and Temporary. The touring.
Speaker 1:One is intended to be set up quickly and be there for a week or several weeks and then taken down and packed back into a truck, so it's sort of optimized for that. So it comes apart easily, it plugs together easily, but it's not necessarily intended to be subjected to the weather and the whatever for an indefinite period of time without maintenance. And we've learned a lot. The challenges of building for a variety of different environments is something that we've faced. Burning man has its own challenges, temporary art installations have their own challenges, and then we've learned a lot over the last couple of years about what it takes to build a piece that's intended to really just stand on its own and operate every night with as little maintenance as possible. We should probably throw out an honorable mention for the installation that was in China.
Speaker 1:Those are really interesting experience, One of the things that happens Burning man used to be a thing that nobody ever heard of, but now it's a thing that draws somewhat amount of international attention. And so our piece caught the notice of Thomas Thompson, who's a French expat working in China who does a lot of different public art installations and event organization and whatnot. So he contacted us and said I wasn't at Burning man, but I loved your piece and it would be perfect for this thing that we're building in downtown Chengdu for a particular special event. And at first we were like I don't know what's this about, Some guy in China wants to build our thing. But Thomas is really great and he convinced us that he had the wherewithal to actually pull it off. So it was a really interesting experience. I don't know, maybe you want to take over that part.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean, what was really interesting about it was, because China was so far away, thomas thought he could fabricate it in China. So that was kind of a new concept for us and so that was really interesting to sort of develop drawings and get everything in place and send them to China and have them kind of build everything. And in this case they built a platform that the runway was on and so it had a platform that had the rings and had all the LEDs, but it was all fabricated in China. And so basically we're working with Thomas and his crew and they were sending us photos and kind of showing us the progress and we were like that looks good, I guess this is working.
Speaker 1:And then we rolled in with a laptop with the software. Basically, they got it all up up but they didn't have it working because they didn't have the software and the laptop that was needed to actually drive it. So we like flew in and walked out and like, try to plug. Is this going to work? You know, everything worked out after a little bit of debugging, thankfully. But the other, the other thing that was really interesting about that is that he didn't just have it up as a, you know, as a piece people could come check, check out, but he actually organized. There was a whole event, kind of kickoff event that happened and, in particular, one thing that he that he organized was a fashion show. It's like, well, it's not just a sonic runway, it's also a runway runway, and so there were four different designers that had their own lines of clothing and it was a big production with like cameras and everything, and we actually worked with some of the designers there to build patterns of on the LEDs that complimented the music that was playing and also the fashion that was part of the collection.
Speaker 1:Most Burning man projects are basically labor of love that's built by the people who are building them for the purpose of bringing your friends together to make something cool. You know we do. We did a fundraiser online to raise some of the funds to build the initial one. Thankfully, the various installations that have gone out into public places have more or less paid for themselves. So we're not like for both of us. This is a hobby project that we do because we enjoy doing it. It's not really intended to, you know, send our kids to college or anything.
Speaker 2:Regarding that, I want to take us back for one second, just because I didn't gather it is Warren you didn't talk about. Can you talk about your, your connection to music and sound from a, you know, from a biographical perspective?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the instrument I played growing up was cello. I played that from third grade to the end of high school. So I too was in orchestras. I really enjoy music. I, you know, listen to music. I've tried my hand at DJing but it's not something that has stuck with me. But I understand it and I kind of can listen to the music and everything. The only thing I can think of that I really connect with is, every year since I was I was 18, I make a little music diary of that year. I keep track of the my favorite music of that year, and then I make a mix of that music at the end of the year. And so after my daughter was born, I started incorporating her music and then it became kind of a birthday present and went through that. So you know, and I use software to kind of mix, blend things together and mix them. And so for me at the moment, music right now is not only something I enjoy but something I use as a little memory device.
Speaker 2:Rob, you're a violinist, Warren you're a cellist, but you're both just broadly very into music. Is that a correct characterization? Of your backgrounds?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I think, like Rob, I too really like that synchronization between image and audio. I really resonate with that, and so when Rob was talking about the idea, I instantly understood what that meant and the impact that that can have on people.
Speaker 1:There's a period in MTV's history, kind of in the late 90s, where there was just a sort of explosion of really interesting creative electronic music videos that were getting made.
Speaker 1:This is sort of like, you know, the Michelle Gondry era where, like around the world and there was a show that would play from like midnight to one, or something called amp on MTV. That had just like a whole plethora of really one more bizarre than the next, but they were really interesting in that they were not so much focused on like a lot of the daytime MTV stuff is just like look at this pop star, here they are and here they are in front of a car or whatever. This was more like a really unique exploration of like sound and music and that synesthesia. Some of them were like really tightly coupled. Also, like there were the videos of them by Cold Cut. There was one that's called Timber, I think, where it was like every little sound had its own visual representation in the in the video and you could watch it all play out and it was like oh, I can see the music in the way that it should be seen, you know. So those are all definitely influences that have led to being interested in this topic.
Speaker 2:What do you think it does for people when they experience it?
Speaker 3:Well, what's interesting is there's no real clear signage of what the piece is or what it is. So a lot of times people will be walking down the street and just attracted to this tunnel of lights, and I think a lot of people to some degree just see it as this beautiful tunnel of lights. But there's this extra layer which is, you know, they start realizing oh wait, the lights kind of match what I'm hearing. So all of a sudden you feel this richer experience because you feel the connection of the synchronized lights and sound. And I don't know if it's really anyone can figure it out, but we do have that speed of sound quality.
Speaker 3:You're watching sound waves travel through space, and so once either people learn that or they do figure it out, it adds a whole other layer to the experience, because then all of a sudden, you're looking at the space around you and understanding that sound waves are moving through it. And so if you're and so the way the runway works is the sound kind of starts at one end, and so if you're standing at that end, you see the sound starting and then moving away from you at the speed of sound. And what's really neat is if you go to the other end and look at the runway from the end. You see the sound start at the other end and come towards you in the lights and then when the lights hit you is when you hear the sound. So you have this really amazing experience of knowing what the sound is going to be, because you can see the pattern before you even hear it.
Speaker 1:And that works particularly well with certain kinds of music where particularly a lot of dance music tracks are built around this idea of there's a, you know, an initial phase and then there's a breakdown, and then there's a build up and then there's kind of like, the beat drops again. And one of the neat things about standing at the far end of the runway is that you know, music is largely about anticipation and then having that either surprise or, you know, having your expectation met about what that's going to be. And one of the you know the beat drop is a powerful moment because it's the thing that's had all this build up and then we're anticipating and then there's often a pause and then there's that moment of arrival when it finally happens. And what you get with the runway is this sort of like you can peek a half a second or a second into the future and you can see it coming. And so I think that has this effect of like adding to the satisfaction of that arrival, because you now like it's more than one sense of arrival and you're kind of like that satisfaction is being met where the pattern is being realized, kind of at the moment, all at the same moment. So as it was set up at Burning man. We actually did basically just have a microphone on the front of it so if nothing else was going on you could walk up to it and shout it into it and it would. Your sound would be propagated down, and that was. We saw many people really get a great kick out of that Throughout the night. We also had there were a series of large art cars that would come up and blast music into it and that would overwhelm any individual voices that people were shouting into it, because the sound systems are loud and they kind of take over the version that's set up.
Speaker 1:In San Jose we have running a streaming you know, music streaming, programming of our own choice. It's not picked up the microphone. That's for a couple of reasons. One, the installation can't be that loud, and so it would. I think a microphone would get overwhelmed by, like traffic and motorcycles and other things going past. It's also just like a little tougher in an open urban environment, you know, to allow people to shout into a microphone and and who knows what's going to come out. That said, we've been working with the folks at the city of San Jose. They've been scheduling a series of events that are hosted at the Sonic Runway down there and they're really interested in using it as an ongoing platform for various performances. So there have been a number of live performances that have been set up and that's really rewarding because then you know people who are playing percussion or singing or whatever have an opportunity to like see their live audio be projected onto this installation.
Speaker 3:But it is really nice because, like Rob was saying, we can connect musicians to it, or DJs, and really allow them the space to put their music onto the Sonic Runway. And something we did recently is the city of San Jose invited a bunch of technologists and artists, visual artists and performers to come down and we were able to show them kind of what we're doing with the audio and how we're turning it into patterns. And one of the nice things about the runway in San Jose in its current iteration is we actually have individual control over the speakers and all the LEDs, and so we were telling them that you know, putting patterns on there and running it down at the speed of sound is only one way to use this canvas. So it was a really fun time to show this to other people and just see what kind of ideas they had of what they could do with the runway.
Speaker 2:That's exciting, and so anything stand out in your mind that they shared other ways of approaching, using it.
Speaker 3:Well, I think it was really interesting because some of them were dancers. So some of them were thinking of, like, how could they convert body motion into signals that the runway would could pick up? So that was one. I think a few video artists were just trying to understand how the LEDs were controlled so they could kind of do different things with the lights. So I think, depending on what art form the person was rooted in, they had different ideas of how they could use the runway.
Speaker 3:And that's one of the really nice things about San Jose is that it's there for the public and it's free, so people can just walk up to it, they can experience it. And we've gone down there a whole bunch to watch people in it and we see whole families go through, we see friends walking through, we see grandparents with their grandkids, we see people stopping to take photos, and it really does create this space that you can be in and just enjoy the lights around you. I always like to describe it as this tunnel of smiles, because everyone is just in it and you just see them smiling and you see people acknowledging each other, because you're just there all enjoying it together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would think there's sort of two parts of it for me. One is definitely like Warren says, in terms of what the goal of the piece is. I think is really to in its. What we're aspiring for, I think, is to create some sense of awe, and for me that comes from a lot of different places, but at least one of them is is there one avenue toward that is making something that was previously invisible visible and or kind of like giving you a window into this sort of like amazing universe that we live in. You know, this is a powerful force of nature that none of us has any control over. That is just like all these molecules bouncing around doing their thing and like if we can make somebody stop for a second and like appreciate that or think about that for a second, or just kind of like feel it, even if they don't quite appreciate it, that to me is worth it.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite things to do is to listen to other people talk about it without them knowing that we're the ones who created it. You know, if you like, go down and stand at the end, particularly at Burning man, there's usually a little gaggle of people sitting there talking about it. And then you know there'd be like some people being like oh, what kind of LEDs do you think they use? And there are the other people you know talking about that, and then there's usually a couple people that are trying to actually puzzle out, like what's going on, like how does this work? You know, sometimes they'll even explain it to us, which is like a particular joy.
Speaker 2:That was inspiring. Get liner notes, guest photos, subscribe to the newsletter and more at agilevocalistcom.
