A collaboration between Parsons The New School for Design, Tellart, and mono, SoundAffects was a recent experiment that used the sights and sounds of NYC's Fifth Avenue to generate digital music and video.
The wall was covered in sensors that absorbed all kinds of data — color, temperature, proximity of passersby, cell-phone interference — and sent them through custom software to create music and videos. Temperature data affected the tempo of the music and color of the video, light data affected the timbre of the music and opacity of the video, etc. 
Passersby could plug their headphones into the wall and hear the sounds being created. At night, the video glowed through the translucent SoundAffects wall. 
An experiment called "Balloon Effect: Can a Sense of Optimism Be a City Resource?"
The ten-day project included ten experiments to see how different disruptions would affect the music, with prompts like "Walking Lanes: Should Sidewalks Tell You What to Do?" and "Social Security: Does Authority Make Us Feel More Comfortable?" Recordings of the music and video generated during the project are available on the SoundAffects Web site.
Found via Creative Applications
