Discover

THE ARTWORK

Impulsion

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.

Impulsion is an invitation to play and collaborate, offering a truly unique collective visual and musical experience.

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

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 Impulsion, 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, while also focusing on the overall visual impact of the installation.

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:

Whether static or in motion, the shape of Impulsion’s series of seesaws and their movements generating wave-like patterns can evoke the image of sound waves.

Different sound wave visualizations.

Voici le plan technique d’Impulsion:

Vois-tu la ressemblance?

© Lateral Office

DID YOU KNOW?

Sound is a vibration of air 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 reveals that Impulsion 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 Impulsion are also very regular and repetitive, we can imagine that their representation as sound waves could resemble these patterns!

Artistic Approach

The creators of Impulsion were tasked with using sound and light as fundamental design elements for their installation. To frame these criteria, they chose the concept of the seesaw, a familiar playground game, in order to keep the concept simple and engage the public in a very intuitive urban play experience.

The seesaw allowed for the exploration of balance and imbalance. For example, the seesaws in Impulsion differ from the classic models found in parks: when not in use, they automatically return to a horizontal position instead of tipping to one side.

On the musical side, composer Mitchell Akiyama also explored notions of balance and imbalance. Through the sound programming of Impulsion, Akiyama incorporated the ability to produce both intensity and calm, tension and cohesion, disorder and harmony simultaneously.

“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.”

Lateral Office suggests that the soundscape of Impulsion is inspired by the music of American composer Steve Reich, known as a pioneer of minimalist music. His music is serial, meaning it is based on a series of simple sounds and plays with repetition, rhythm, and variations to create constantly evolving textures and patterns.

Indeed, Akiyama had to ensure that the tones produced by each seesaw were interesting on their own, but also when layered with the random sounds of other moving seesaws, without getting lost into cacophony.

Steve Reich

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