foosball

Foosball was largely inspired by Stanford CCRMA's Virtual Acoustics in Immersive Audio workshop, and the project continued after I returned to Shenzhen for an event where there happened to be a table football setup to experiment with. The arrangement around the table is fairly straightforward in principle. A contact microphone sits under the playing surface and picks up impacts, spins, and the low continuous rattle the rods make as players move them, while a directional microphone points at the table from a short distance above and captures how each hit moves through the space around it. Both signals feed into Spat Revolution, which treats every ball contact as a moving sound source and places it inside a synthesized sound field that follows the actual position of play in real time.

What that arrangement produces is a table doing two jobs at once: a foosball match still unfolds in the usual way, while a site-specific sound piece runs alongside it, locked to the geometry of play and following whatever shape the match takes in that moment. A quick score becomes a short musical event, and a long back-and-forth exchange turns into a longer one.

Due to a tight schedule, video documentation was not captured.