Sonic Runway San Jose

This was a project I was very tangentially involved with at burningman and it's now a semi permanent installation in San Jose. The person who came up with the idea was standing in the desert at sunrise looking back at the dance floor of one of the sound camps. He was watching a girl dance but noticed that she was kind of a half a beat off and then realized that the sound wave was reaching him slightly later than it was reaching her. Speed of sound vs speed of light. Being the crazy man he is he wanted to illustrate that the next year. So we built about hundred PVC teepees with a single LED light at the top and stretched them out from the dance floor about a mile out into the desert. Then he wrote the program to tie the whole thing into the sound system and each beat from the sound system would race out into the desert on the LED teepees. If you stood at the end the light LED teepee would shine at the same moment the beat would reach you. 

Anyway much more sophisticated now than a single LED light but still the same idea.

https://www.sonicrunway.com/