Raga Sequencer

Interactive museum installation
Museum Rietberg, Zürich Sep. 2024 - Jan. 2025
Client: Museum Rietberg
Concept, Programming, Installation: Raphael Benz, Nachtlicht
Construction: Stahl & Traumfabrik
Design control panel: Museum Rietberg
Tools: TouchDesigner, Native Instruments Kontakt

The Ragamala exhibition at the Museum Rietberg explores the traditional art of Indian Ragamala. This includes not only painting and poetry but also the musical theory of Raga. For this musical segment of the exhibition, Nachtlicht was asked to design and create a playful installation that allows visitors to create their own melodies within the scales of Raga.

The installation works as a physical sequencer: Wooden cubes are placed on the grid of the tabletop, producing different notes depending on their position. Cubes placed higher on the grid generate higher notes than those placed lower.

The control panel on the left allows users to manage playback and choose from various instruments.

The control panel allows for changing the instruments, showing presets and toggling the play button.

A projector on the inside of the chassis projects visual feedback directly onto the plexiglass grid.

Technology
At the core of the installation is a media server, a central PC where all signals come together. It processes the camera feed to detect the wooden cubes, reads data from the control panel, and generates both the audio and visuals for the projection.

To make this possible, I developed a program in TouchDesigner that allows me to seamlessly integrate and process those different types of data, transforming them into both sound and dynamic projections.

Behind the scenes of the control software. The upper half shows input signals (Arduino signals from the control panel, video signal from the camera) and how they are processed. The bottom half shows the output signals (audio and projection).

Technical components inside of the wooden chassis.

Process
Before arriving at the final concept and design, we at Nachtlicht iterated through different interactive ideas to playfully experience the Raga scales.

Original concept, where melody segments are placed on a physical timeline

Iterations of the control panel layout

Final previsualisation for the carpentry