“Forty-two dinner plate-sized discs of light shiver and pulsate on the floor of the venue. Around them, three piccolo players sit cross-legged, emitting a series of stuttered, syncopated pulses which at once excite and inhibit the shimmering blue discs. Each disc is engorged or diminished by a different pitch, and as the lights grow past a certain threshold, they make a high-pitched piping sound themselves which triggers in turn other sounds, releasing a micro-tonal Mexican wave of electronic sounds that the system’s creator, artist Tim Otto Roth, describes as a klangteppich – a "sound carpet”. It may not look much like it at first, but this is your brain on music.“
Learn more about Tim Otto Roth and his "Sonapticon” in my latest article for Wired.