DJ Booth

DJ Booth is an interactive I designed, coded, and installed as a Creative Technologist at the Museum of Ice Cream. Guests step up to real DJ controllers and become the DJ — working the turntable to play the music in their headphones while the room’s animated lights move with them. Stop, slow down, or speed up the platter and the animation stops, slows, or speeds up too, one to one.

Under the hood, a Java/Processing sketch reads the turntable’s velocity and direction and pipes that data into two engines at once: VirtualDJ for the audio and MadMapper for the visuals. In MadMapper the motion drives the playback speed of the shaders, which are then pixel-mapped onto the LED bars (manufactured by MadMapper’s parent company). The result is a tight, seamless audio-visual loop where a guest’s hand on the jog wheel is the single source of truth for both sound and light.

Installed on the museum floor and stress-tested by the guides before it opened to guests, the booth turned a photogenic set piece into something you actually play. Lead photography by Maria Svarbova.