Sound Haven Music and Arts Festival 2025
Sound Haven 2026 was the third time I’d created an art installation for the festival at the Kouch Kollective stage. I love creating things over multiple years in the same location, because it allows me the opportunity to explore many different types of designs that can manipulate perception in vastly different ways.
This year, the Kouch guys brought in a different sound system with a different speaker arrangement. Previous years had used a single mono stack, something rarely seen at festivals in the U.S. but more often seen in Europe. The new system for this year, brought by SubCulture Audio, was a brand new Hennessey rig that had a more traditional wide subwoofer setup with left and right vertical speaker stacks for the mids and highs. The rig was also repositioned slightly compared to previous years, because the previous spot was simply not wide enough to accommodate the new rig.
A new rig with a new size in a slightly new location is a nice starting point for me when coming up with designs. Since the new rig was the prominent feature in the updated woods stage area I chose to have the focus be on this rig. With my art I really enjoy manipulating the perception of ceiling height so I made that the focus with the focal point being the sound rig. I also chose to use only one color to maintain emphasis on the overall shape and it’s impact on latent spatial perception.
The design I created was a long expanding “V” shape that originated from about 20ft behind the sound system and extended across the whole concert area. The low vertex of the “V” was roughly aligned with the center of the subwoofer stack and the DJ platform, which was positioned in front of the speakers, out in the middle of the dancefloor appx. 30 ft from the rig. The sides extended from this low vertex up into the trees appx. 16ft.
Creating this long V shape across the dance floor created an unusual feeling in the space. The ceilings gave a compressional feeling, especially when standing in the middle region, with the centerline becoming a long focal point. Walking from one side of the piece to the other created vastly different feelings. The far right and left edges of the stage felt open but moving to the center forced your perception lower to the ground and drew attention more to the people around you. When coupled with the long low vertex line that always led directly back to the DJ and sound source, it brought your focus back to the music. Moving outward again from this gave a palpable sense of release.
The stage did use lasers, but I did not deploy my own laser setup. However, since the piece was centered on speaker stack, and the lasers were centered on the speaker stack, the effects from the lasers ended up looking great inadvertently.
Size: appx 140’x 40′ wide at max x 16′ tall
