Listening to downloaded music has been around for decades, but now – thanks to a Guangdong-based architecture firm – you can see the music that you’re downloading. (But only if you’re walking past the headquarters of the right online music company in Shenzhen).
Chinese design studio, UNIT (Urban New Idea Team) designed the newly completed headquarters of online music company A8 to resemble a series of sound waves, and incorporated interactive LED lighting into the facade that visualises the music being downloaded from the company’s website.
“The approach for this project was to create a tower which embodies its function, thereby promoting the dynamism of music as well as the hosted user,” Moyang Yang, founder of UNIT said in a statement.
The waves of glass panels that make up the 50,000 square metre office building’s exterior reflect the sky and surrounding buildings during the day., and at night, the building lights up like a giant equaliser.
- Vertical view of the building facade
- The facade and right side of the building
- A model of the A8.com building
- An aerial rendering of the building
- The building facade from below
- Approaching the A8 building from the highway
- The building’s rippled front facade seen from a distance
The visualisation works by organising the LEDs into a Scriabin keyboard – a system for associating tones with colours. The LED keyboard is then synced to data about the music being downloaded from the company’s site.
To see the visualisation in action, here’s a YouTube video (which for us mainlanders is only visible via a VPN).
Leave a Reply