Event Information:
Park Lab EXPT. 02
What music does
the city play?
Sony Park Mini, an experimental pop-up space of around 30 m² for the New Ginza Sony Park scheduled to be completed in 2024, opened Park Lab on Thursday, June 16, 2022. Park Lab is a series program that lets visitors experience Sony Group’s various explorations.
Sony’s engineers and creators are constantly seeking ways that technology and creativity can contribute to create experiences that move people’s hearts. Park Lab is a program intended to offer a peek into the future discovered within everyday life by Sony. It is an experimental space designed to encourage people to see things in daily life from slightly different perspectives.
Park Lab EXPT. 02 will offer an experience to enjoy the transient cityscape as music. Sony’s sensing and AI technologies will be used to turn the movements of people, cars and light into music in real time. It is an experiment to see what kind of music the city plays. The event displays a prototype made by Sony’s design team, in collaboration with engineers.
Designers work on a variety of design development, including research on interactive sound design.
Sound and sound effects, such as music to express the world view of videogames, relax, or concentrate, are important components of experience. This exhibition combines sensing and AI technology with sound design to generate “transformable background music” in real time, suggesting a new user experience.
At the exhibition, visitors can enjoy music played by the scenery, implemented as a smartphone application. Music is generated in real time using information from image sensors. Designers collaborated with engineers to create a prototype with the concept of elevating interactive sound to musical expression and turning it into an enjoyable experience.
The music-playing mechanism
Comments from the design team:
Making and actually trying out prototypes is one of the processes we value in designing. For example, if you can listen to scenery as music, what kind of experience does that lead to? I would like to share time observing with many people through this exhibition and make the most of what we learn in future development.
Design Producer Tambata
Haven’t you ever had the memorable experience of walking through town, listening to music, and suddenly the music and scenery sync up? Music played by an ordinary landscape right in front of you changes it to an extraordinary, striking scene. I would like visitors to experience such a world, even just a little.
The prototype displayed in this exhibit is no more than a mere part of what makes up the combination of information from image sensors with musical expression. I want to pursue richer musical expression by combining various elements in the future.
Designer Fujiki
The view from yesterday looks a bit different today. This is an experimental space to encounter that sort of opportunity. Be sure to experience this peek into the future, a trend born at Sony that may just about be a step toward the future, with Sony Park Mini’s new Park Lab series program.
- Program title
- Park Lab EXPT. 02 What music does the city play?
- Duration
- Fri., June 24 - Fri., July 1, 2022 *This program has ended.
- Hours
- 11:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. (scheduled)
*Open from 1:00 p.m. only on the first day (June 24) due to preparations - Location
- Sony Park Mini (B1 Nishi-Ginza Parking, 5-3-1 Chisaki, Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061)
- Website
- https://www.sonypark.com/e/mini/