How the installation works
Three simple steps — designed for everyone to use.
1 · Listen
Choose one of the four featured audio tracks and press play. No setup, no accounts — just press and listen.
2 · Scan
At the building site, point your phone camera at the physical chromagram pattern. Pattern recognition matches the artwork to its track and starts playing it.
3 · Watch
The harmonic spectrum of the music blooms across the screen in real time — every note and rhythm translated into colour and motion.
The Artwork
The Four Compositions
The artwork comprises four horizontal bands, each derived from a different musical composition. Of twelve works submitted by Sydney Conservatorium of Music undergraduate students, three compositions were selected by lecturers from Contemporary Music Practice, Composition for Creative Industries and Digital Music Composition. A fourth composition was contributed by Professor Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, providing an important connection to First Nations perspectives and the Traditional Custodians of the land on which the campus stands.
Skyscrapers
Alexander Benson
130 panels | 13m × 735mm
An energetic work inspired by the scale, movement and density of urban life. Layered synthesiser lines and rhythmic structures build upward in intensity, reflecting the verticality of the modern city skyline.
"Skyscrapers stands as both a musical and symbolic gesture toward the Con’s expansion into Parramatta, articulating an ascent in artistic vision that parallels its architectural elevation. Skyscrapers contemplates height not merely as a measure of space (but) as a metaphor for creative aspiration and freedom to express."
Lagoon Vignettes
Jessica Foreman
100 panels | 10m × 100mm
A series of musical sketches inspired by coastal environments. Through shifting textures, melodic fragments and timbral variation, the composition evokes water, wind and the rhythms of the natural world.
"Inspired by the Australian Currawong it captures the beauty of a lagoon and bushland, nestled in Blue Mountains suburbia. It brings a little fragment of the Blue Mountains into the SCMP, representing the diverse homes our musicians come from and the timelessness of capturing the world’s beauty through art."
Long Night Chorale
Professor Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO
160 panels | 16m × 100mm
A choral work that layers vocal harmonies into rich and sustained sonic textures. Overlapping voices and gradually evolving tonal relationships create a powerful sense of resonance and reflection.
Professor Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, a Yorta Yorta woman, soprano, composer and educator, has been a pioneering force in the Australian arts landscape for more than twenty-five years.
Slow Blinking Streetlight
Maxwell Mollica
140 panels | 13m × 93mm
An atmospheric electronic composition built from evolving textures and rhythmic pulses. Inspired by the intermittent glow of a streetlight, the work balances ambient sounds with subtle percussive elements.
"In creating both tracks I heavily utilised the sounds of my environment, using audio of cars driven at night, the ambience of Western Sydney streets, and my first car with its extremely loud exhaust – grounding the track to Western Sydney in its composition as well as concept."
These four tracks are also available inside the Live Visualiser for real-time chromagram playback.
Three ways to see sound
Every track can be experienced through three distinct visual languages — switch freely while listening.
Ultrawide
A sweeping, cinema-wide ribbon of colour that scrolls with the music — every pitch class painted as it sounds.
Radial
Concentric rings that pulse and expand from the centre, mapping the harmonic energy of the track in real time.
Burra
An Aboriginal-inspired vision of nodal constellations and serpent-like corridors, guided by the rhythm of the sound.
You can also use your microphone — hum, sing or play anything live, and choose from a range of colour palettes to paint it with.