Discover

THE ARTWORK

ImpulsE

by Lateral Office and CS Design with soundscape by Mitchell Akiyama invites you into its interactive playground to take part in a sound and light experience.

Hop onto the seesaws to set them in motion, changing their light intensity and musical tones as you play.

Impulse draws inspiration from the musical concept of serialism, a technique based on the repetition and variation of a defined series of sounds, to create moments of intensity and calm.

With this urban instrument, you become musicians, contributing to the creation of a constantly evolving musical composition.

THE artists

© George Qua Enoo
Founded in 2003 by Lola Sheppard and Mason White, Lateral Office is a Toronto-based firm known for its experimental creative practice at the intersection of architecture, environment and context. The studio views architecture and design as a response to the complex and pressing questions of the built environment, engaged within a broader context and committed to social, ecological, or political projects.
© Charlie Lesmarois
CS Design is a lighting design firm founded in 2008 by Conor Sampson. Various architecture, landscape architecture, and engineering firms rely on CS Design to illuminate parks, heritage buildings, monuments, and works of art. Their expertise ranges from specifying electric lighting and programmable controls to designing custom fixtures and improving energy efficiency.

Creative Intention

With Impulse, the creators wanted to explore how architecture can visualize sound, that is, represent it in a visible form.

To do so, they chose to use lighting effects that intensify with the rhythm of the music being played for example, while also focusing on the overall visual impact of the installation.

Different sound wave visualizations.

Have you ever recorded your voice on a digital platform, like a music software, an audio editing program, or a voice memo app?

If so, you’ve probably seen shapes like these appear:

In fact, the shape created by Impulse’s series of seesaws, as well as their collective movement generating wave-like patterns can evoke the image of sound waves.

Here is Impulse's technical plan.

Do you see the resemblance?

DID YOU KNOW?

Sound is a vibration that travels in waves of higher or lower pressure.

On music software, audio editing programs, and voice memo apps, when you record your voice, the sound appears as waves, represented as curves with peaks and valleys or bars of varying height, showing changes in volume and frequency over time.

In fact, a sound wave has two main characteristics: frequency and amplitude, which respectively affect the pitch of the sound (high to low) and its volume (loud to soft).

Lateral Office revealed that Impulse is inspired by the iconic 1979 album cover “Unknown Pleasures” by the British rock band Joy Division.

Although it does not show sound waves (which can be confusing, since the image appears on a music album cover), the waves it does show look very similar!

Album cover of “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division, designed by Peter Saville.

The design of Joy Division’s album cover is actually a graphic taken directly from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.

They are actually electromagnetic waves emitted by a tiny star with an extremely stable rotation period, called a pulsar. As the star spins, it emits radiation in the form of a beam at very regular intervals, like a lighthouse, which can be detected by radio telescopes. This is the scientific image of that phenomenon.

Since the sounds produced by Impulse are also very regular and repetitive, we can imagine that their representation as sound waves could resemble these patterns!

FUN FACT!

Artistic Approach

The creators of Impulse chose the classic playground seesaw in order to keep it a simple concept and to invite the public to take part in a highly intuitive form of urban play.

But the seesaw was also interesting as a way to explore the ideas of balance and imbalance.

For example, the Impulse seesaws differ from the ones we usually see in parks, since they return to a horizontal balance point when they are not being used, instead of falling to one side.

The creators of Impulse were also tasked with using sound and light as fundamental design elements.

Composer Mitchell Akiyama therefore decided to explore notions of balance and imbalance through Impulse’s music as well. Among the range of sounds he selected for Impulse, he allowed for the coexistence of intensity and calm, tension and cohesion, disorder and harmony.

“I tried to create a range of sounds that is simple, pure, and digital, yet also rich. I wanted to start with a very simple form that grows in complexity the more people use it.”

According to Lateral Office, the soundscape of Impulse is inspired by the music of American composer Steve Reich, known as a pioneer of minimalist music. His work is serial, meaning that it relies on a series of simple sounds and plays with repetition, rhythm, and variation to create evolving textures and patterns.

Minimalist and serial music was well suited to a project like this. Indeed, Akiyama had to ensure that the tones produced by each seesaw were interesting on their own, but also that they could harmonize with the random sounds of other seesaws in motion, without descending into cacophony.

Steve Reich

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