100 sine waves being belted out of 100 cars as part of the Red Bull Academy Los Angeles Festival could possibly be the largest synthesizer orchestra ever.
In classic Red Bull fashion, where nothing is off-limits, this particular orchestra is a collaboration between audio-visual artist Ryoji Ikeda, ex-Korg engineer Tatsuya Takahashi and 100 LA car owners.
The project was born out of Ikeda’s desire to explore the multiple frequencies of note A, which has been widely adopted as 440Hz by the Western music world. Observing that there have been 100 different variations assigned to the note over the years, Ryoji hit upon the idea of 100 cars each playing a different frequency that has been attributed to the note of A.
‘A [For 100 Cars]’ was performed on top of a multi-storey car park in LA as part of the festival. Each car-owner was equipped with a custom synthesizer tuned to one of the 100 varying frequencies.
The synths were created by none other than Mr Volca himself, Tatsuya ‘Tats’ Takahashi, and designed to output a pure sine wave. The result was a 28-minute long piece which involved each car pumping out its chosen frequency through the stereo.
