After listening to Brian Eno's generative music and Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, students receive a p5.js starter sketch using the p5.sound library, with the microphone level and the clock already read into variables. Each student decides how the installation should answer the room: for example thinning to a single drone when the foyer is loud and opening into slow chords when it is quiet, or shifting mode as the day moves from morning to afternoon. Over four lessons they code the sound, test it against recorded crowd noise, and then run it on a laptop and speaker in the foyer for a day, where the microphone level is read live and nothing is recorded or stored. Each student writes a 200-word statement on how the input is mapped to sound and what visitors noticed.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.