Vision —
The Listening Machine is a 24-channel spatial composition that imagines the Jay Pritzker Pavilion as a sentient structure, one that listens to the city of Chicago, attempts to understand it, and sings back in a language of memory, error, and awe.
Designed specifically for the Pavilion’s trellis system, the piece unfolds in four movements* reflecting synthetic cognition: Initialization (the Machine wakes), Input (it listens), Processing (it dreams, misremembers), and Response (it speaks). Each movement employs spatial choreography that transforms the Pavilion into a sonic neural network, from heartbeat-like pulses that bloom outward in concentric waves to harmonic modulations that shift unexpectedly across the speaker array.
Throughout the piece, the Machine attempts to translate the city’s complexity into its own internal logic. The literal geography of the Pavilion (aligned north, south, east, and west) becomes a canvas for interpreting Chicago’s sonic and civic landscape. Speakers act as memory nodes or surrogate neighborhoods, each voicing fragments of the Machine’s evolving perception: field recordings misfiled as melody, harmonic constructions misaligned with place, and synthetic choirs that wander through districts of meaning. The Machine does not understand the city, but it remembers, it echoes, it dreams.
Blending modular synthesis, field recordings, extended harmony, and orchestral mapping, The Listening Machine reimagines the Pavilion and the city as both protagonist and instrument. The result is a dreaming, reverberating portrait of place, both real and imagined.
*SCROLL DOWN FOR A SYNOPSIS OF THE FOUR MOVEMENTS.
Experience —
I’m a musician, composer, and producer based in Chicago. I play piano, guitar, drums, and modular synth, and release music under my own name, blending ambient, experimental, and rock influences. I also play drums and synths in the post-hardcore band Dust Biters. Our latest release, Subtitles, is a four-song EP released on June 6. My work often explores themes of memory, miscommunication, and perception.
I’m developing The Listening Machine as part of a longform investigation into spatial cognition and sonic architecture. While this will be my first piece using a 24-channel array, I have extensive experience composing in Logic Pro and customizing spatial panning and multitrack routing in Reaper. I’ve worked in a range of live performance contexts across music and film festivals, combining real-time improvisation, pre-recorded material, and modular gear.
I also have a background in curating and producing hybrid media events. I was Assistant Director of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and served as Development and Operations Director of the Cucalorus Festival. I still program for both. At Cucalorus, I helped run Visual/Sound/Walls, an immersive program combining video art, projection mapping, live performance, and interactive media.
In The Listening Machine, my goal is to create not just a multichannel installation, but a spatial experience that breathes, remembers, and transforms in place. I also want to have fun with the 24-speaker system, using it to explore the city of Chicago through its own sounds, and through the way I interpret those sounds musically.
— Work —
These are broadcasts from the dream engine. Ambient, solo compositions utilizing the sonic power of synchronized video and audio synths. I press a note and the wall replies.
In these clips, I patch music from my band Dust Biters into my modular synthesizer, and the machine dreams. It pull apart our songs and reconfigures them as something I call quantum soundscapes, fractured possibilities held in unstable equilibrium. Each version is shaped by the moment it's heard: when you listen, the wave collapses. The song becomes something else, not a remix, not a cover, but a singular mutation that exists only for that performance. These two experiments use songs from the new Dust Biters EP, Subtitles, released June 6.
Here are two collaborations with my brother, drone pilot and photographer Matthew van Arsdale.
The Listening Machine — Synopsis of the four movements
MOVEMENT ONE: Initialization | The Machine Wakes
The Machine tests its outputs. It begins with a heartbeat: lub in the center of the grid (speakers 10, 11, 14, 15), expanding outward (to speakers 6, 7, 8, 12, 16, 20, 19, 18, 17, 13, 9), then dissipating to the perimeter. The Machine awakens. It breathes. Soft synths emerge like a sunrise. Layers of harmony drift across the Pavilion like clouds. City textures, ventilation hums, train brakes, human breath, move gently through the grid’s zones. A rhythm appears, subtle but persistent: time begins.
MOVEMENT TWO: Input | The City Speaks
Field recordings enter. Snippets from across Chicago’s neighborhoods appear in zones aligned to their true geographic position, north, south, east, west, mapped directly onto the speaker grid. At first, only one speaker at a time. Then two. Then many. The layers multiply into chaos. The city speaks all at once. The Machine listens and tries to understand. Audio is sliced, misaligned, pitched. The Machine interprets like Grid Gossip. Pulsing synths shimmer across the array, building complex chords and modulations. Arpeggios travel across space like light. The Machine begins to lift both in harmony and motion.
MOVEMENT THREE: Processing | Error / Memory
An orchestra is mapped onto the Pavilion, its instrumental sections arranged across the grid (see image below). Melodic motifs repeat, but not quite. They’re glitched, reversed, misremembered. The Machine falters. It cannot comprehend. Strings dissolve. Percussion fragments into static. Sharp synths slice through an industrial haze. Field recordings are shredded, digitized, corrupted. The harmony spirals around the circle of fifths, but never lands. This is the Machine dreaming and failing to make sense.
MOVEMENT FOUR: Response | The Echo Back
A single tone. Then another. Then all speakers echo it outward. The sounds of morning return: wind in the trees, lake shore waves, distant birds. A blanket of shimmering synth pads rises like mist. The Machine sings, not in understanding, but in memory. Motifs from previous movements reappear in dialogue across the grid, a call-and-response of synthetic reflection. Resolution. Resilience. The city continues. It lives. Like the lake, like the wind, like the people. Alive, together.