Soul Resonator (2025) – Caleb Adams and Yonghyun Kim
Soul Resonator is an interactive sound installation that invites participants to revive and reinterpret the souls of the departed. It presents three virtual figures—composite, fictional representations of people who have passed—each with a partially missing life narrative. These figures are encoded with five unique “blanks” in their story, waiting to be filled in.
The experience begins when a visitor approaches the symbolic coffin. A camera detects their presence, triggering the display of a partially completed statement about one of the figures. Visitors are invited to select how each blank should be filled—making choices based on instinct, interpretation, or projection. Each selection maps to a corresponding musical sample or sound effect, and as the blanks are completed, a custom soundscape emerges—one that reflects the interpreted identity of the soul.
To deepen the interaction, visitors may optionally place a heartbeat sensor on their finger. This act unlocks additional narrative fragments—hidden details about the figure’s past—inviting a more informed and empathetic reading of the person’s life. As visitors engage more deeply, the blanks may be “corrected” or reshaped, and the musical output evolves in response. The heartbeat itself becomes part of the composition, with the music’s tempo syncing to the participant’s real-time BPM, creating a literal resonance between the living and the remembered.
However, the user does not have total control over this world between life and death. As they play the instrument, the instrument changes and evolves. Life and death make up our world, but our own control over our circumstances is fleeting. In reality, the only thing we can constantly control is our interpretation, but this too is another facet of life in constant motion.
Soul Resonator challenges the notion that remembrance is static or factual. It suggests that memory is participatory, interpretive, and creative. The project asks: What do we choose to remember? What do we assume or project? How does empathy—or lack thereof—shape the legacies we construct and the histories we interpret?
At its core, the work is a meditation on mortality, memory, and meaning. It posits that to be forgotten is a sorrowful fate, but to be remembered—truthfully or not—is an act of collective authorship. The heartbeat sensor symbolizes a deeper commitment to understanding; an acknowledgment that remembrance requires more than surface impressions—it requires connection, curiosity, and care.
Atlanta Symphony (2025) – Diego Caraballo, Kieran Laprade, Jacob Westerstahl, Iris Wu
CLIO AND MNEMOSYNE (2025) – Jason Gao
CLIO AND MNEMOSYNE explores the identity of the author on two interwoven levels—in the context of history, situated within a broader Chinese and American culture and collective consciousness, and in the context of memory, within the intimate reflections of family and deeply personal episodes. Different fragments and cultural depictions reveal an identity that blurs the definition of genuinity—as traditions are passed, transformed, co-opted, and overridden through generations of memory and depiction from both people within the culture and outside observers, within larger cultures and a specific family, what it means to be authentic and true to a culture and the self is seen to be dynamic and malleable.
The work showcases through collage and vignette various aspects of the author’s relationship to their cultural and familial situation—feelings of immense pride of a culture, of the stories and legacy of their own family members, conflict with their identity and their relations, hypocrisy and shame within their self depiction. Through a multifaceted portrait of the author through their relationship with others and their culture, the work explores identity not as a singular point for an individual but as the gradual culmination and natural continuation of generations of identities, not as an endpoint in a line of people but as one singular bead within an interwoven mesh, extending in all directions.
CLIO AND MNEMOSYNE is a self portrait of the author, where their identity is defined not only by their relationship with others, but also how they interpret and transform their relationships to both family and culture into something novel.
A Helluva Year (2025) – Rowan Beasley, Laura Gomez, Jalyn Fisher
Patches (2025) – Griffin Rahn
I feel inspired to capture the places of my life in the same way that I felt Christian Walker so effectively did in his work, The Profane and Poignant. While photography would be a difficult aspect to turn into an interactive musical experience (I brainstormed a lot on this), I realized that I had a project at hand that could be adapted to perfectly accomplish what I was looking for. Over my travels, I have collected patches from places that I have visited or hold special memories to me. I have been putting off creating my final pair of “travel jeans” that would hold all of these places. Instead, I want to convert these patches into capacitive sensors, creating a number of individual soft circuits that will interface with Ableton Live by triggering a sample based on the patch. Each patch contains a few sounds, and which sound is triggered is based on a button input by the user. A flex band next to the enclosure will enable the user to control tempo while simultaneously controlling the music. In this demonstration, Griffin Rahn presents a collection of his collegiate travels as an undergraduate and graduate student at Georgia Tech and its exchange program based in Metz France. The places range from Europe to Texas, all contributing to a diverse cacophony of a single musical, cultural, and biographical experience.
Industrial Night by Vaughn Ambros, Gabriel Decker, Rhett Hutchins, Caleb Spain
Crown for Everyone (2025) – Jeet Ajmani and Markus Parker
Courtney Brooks’ This Crown Belongs to Us is a celebration of Black hair practices and their cultural significance. Through her work, Brooks explores themes of self-identity, self-love, and embracing one’s heritage, using oversized braids as a powerful visual metaphor for unity, resilience, and creativity. The piece reminds viewers of the importance of Black hair as both an individual expression and a communal tradition, fostering connections and creating a sense of cultural pride.
Inspired by Brooks’ work, Capacitive Crown is a musically interactive installation that reimagines the crown as both a piece of art and a musical instrument. The crown features conductive braids flowing down from its base, symbolizing the beauty and complexity of Black hair while inviting users to engage with it in a dynamic way. Equipped with an accelerometer embedded in the crown, the piece detects tilt and movement, translating physical gestures into sound. This data is sent via a Bluetooth microcontroller to a laptop running Max and Ableton Live, where it is transformed into a musical composition.
The musical aspect of the crown mirrors the themes of Brooks’ work: just as braids intertwine separate strands into a cohesive whole, the crown weaves together distinct sounds that evolve as the user interacts with it. The more the crown is engaged with the more complex the composition becomes—creating a unique soundscape that reflects the wearer’s movements. The ultimate goal for this installation is the user to find peace in these sounds as the user sees fit. The stochastic swaying movement of the braids from Brooks’ work inspires the ambient windchimes that sonically drive Capacitive Crown.
In addition to the crown is a satellite module consisting of a 3-string conductive cord “guitar” and a single-piece chessboard occupied by a queen. These two components in tandem control an acoustic guitar and various effects including reverb, flanger, and delay.
Cannon in D for a solo performer performed by Jennefer Bennett
Political Climate (2025) – Devon Green
Political Climate is an interactive musical sculpture built entirely from discarded materials. As a response to Sayma Hossain’s Ten Toes Down, this piece turns waste into an instrument of protest. Visitors will engage with a structure made from plastic containers, cardboard, and scrap materials—each embedded with sensors that respond to touch, motion, and light.
When activated, the piece plays a layered soundscape: spliced political speeches denying climate change, news article snippets about climate disasters, and fading environmental recordings of rainforests, coral reefs, and wildfires. Through layering sounds and loops, the piece builds an overwhelming soundscape reflective of the overwhelming crisis we face.
At the end of each cycle, a calm, clear voice delivers a final message that we have the infrastructure. We have the knowledge. What we need now is our political leaders to make the necessary changes.
Through sound, interactivity, and material reclamation, Political Climate challenges the audience to consider what kind of world we are shaping—and what kind of world we’re willing to save.
AquaSonics (2025) – Jayson Faupel, Yuna Lim, Shirin Sathe, Adam Vogel
Latent Space (2025) – Ishaan Jagyasi and Kyle Smith
Lantent Space is inspired by Alyson Denny’s Photon Motion, a series of looping silent videos created by recording refracted and distorted light through motorized glass objects. An exploration and abstraction of memories altered over time, Photon Motion communicates a meditative stillness, yet remains in constant motion, shifting just beyond absolute clarity. Drawn to the manner in which the visuals prompt the audience towards calm introspection, this interactive system aims to shift the visual abstraction found in Photon Motion into something active and participatory, rather than merely passive.
The interface is intentionally minimal: a capacitive touch grid, a pressure-sensitive strip, and a rotary encoder become the tools that allow the viewer to interact with the artwork slowly, intuitively, and without instruction. These physical inputs shape and control a custom RAVE generative model that outputs the ambient textures.
The goal is not to perfect or polish the interaction. Like Denny’s visuals, this project embraces emergent behavior, entropy and blur. The sound isn’t intended to simply explain the piece or make it more approachable, but to add another sensory dimension that catalyzes additional interpretation through absolute immersion. In this way, the audience becomes part of the system’s feedback loop, part of the ongoing abstraction and an extra artistic layer that re-processes and re-prioritizes the immediacy of each frame that make up the looping videos.
By capitalizing on the variability of audience interpretation we open a dialogue between image, sound, and participant. It’s about slowing down, engaging the profound nature of crossmodal correspondence, and listening to what emerges.
MARTA (2025) – Jennefer Bennett, Micah Lim, Cooper Reagin, Theo Sommer
Repelling Paths (2025) – Noel Alben
The path to learning and acquiring knowledge is never linear; you will constantly hit roadblocks and will have to backtrack and make different choices as you try to move forward. You may never ever reach the end of the goal you first set out with. However, the beauty of acquiring knowledge is that regardless of constant deadends and loops, you will always leave having gained something tangible for yourself, and all you have to do is have faith in yourself and your curiosity. In the popular video game Outerwilds, you are an explorer of your solar system, uncovering its mysteries and stories about a species that inhabited it before your time. There are no set rules; there are no levels. With just six planets and your sun, you can roam and explore as much as your heart desires, driven only by curiosity.
Players will encounter a dark, twisty, and vine planet, “The Dark Bramble.ˮ Traversing this planet is scary and unpredictable as it does not have a conventional surface to land on, it is infected by a vine-like plant that has created pocket dimensions that have you endlessly falling through it, but each node you choose to enter takes you to a different part of the planet that leads you to discover some of the deepest secrets of the game, the further you trust your curiosity to guide you without giving up.
Inspired by the diversity of paths you can take to acquire knowledge and dark brambles twisted traversal, I present to you “Repelling Paths,ˮ a Lego Maze Musical Interface. “Repelling Pathsˮ invites you to traverse its maze and discover the musical world it has built. You can tweak your controls and explore as much as you like. There are no rules, but you will surely “feel itˮ when you have reached a point worth exploring.