Leave A Message

Leave A Message is an interactive sonic art installation by Conor Barry that encourages people to leave messages in 6 phones hanging from the ceiling.
When a participant says ‘Hello’ into the mouthpiece, that phone will then ask the participant how they are feeling, or what they are looking forward to today and so on. Up to 10 messages can be stored on each phone until the oldest message is replaced.
The messages play in an overlapping loop and anyone can approach the phones and listen to the anonymous messages left behind by others.
This first iteration of Leave a Message took place over the course of a week outside Design Lab 1, at the Duderstadt Center, University of Michigan.

How did this project use Max?

Max was used to control all of the audio in this project. Level threshold detection triggered an 'operator' to reply to the participant with an array of questions. When the question had been posed to the participant, their microphone feed was recorded into a buffer until their microphone threshold turned off. Each recording would playback amongst a loop of previous recordings on each phone.