Granulator & Particle Instrument

The Granulator & Particle Instrument was created for my sound sculpture and installation series interrogating the entanglement of material, language, meaning, and the sensory. It generates real-time particle visualizers built from textual language with basic projection mapping capabilities, alongside granular synthesis of speech recordings.

It is a Raspberry Pi based instrument equipped with dedicated audio HATs. This embedded design provides a more reliable, sustainable, and standalone solution that operates without reliance on proprietary software.

Most importantly, as a real-time system, the box becomes an instrument that ‘plays’ the sculpture; positioning the ephemeral formality of the piece and the physical instrument playing it in parallel.

Works Using this Instrument

SuN & mOOn (2025)

waterFALL (2025)

Hello. hEllo! heLLo? hellO (2023)

Technical Info

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a series of installation and sculpture works where they are formulated through the blurry boundaries between material and semiotics. Before this Raspberry Pi instrument, running them involved a laptop with Max, an audio interface, and amplifiers.

The new instrument, which is named Granulator & Particle Instrument, folds all of that into a single enclosure with a footprint of 4.7 × 2.3 × 3.15 inches. One HDMI cable to the projector, speaker cables straight from the transducer, power, and it boots into the work automatically. The software changed just as much. The visuals are written in C and render directly bare metal, no display server, no window manager, no desktop, holding 3,750 particles at a steady 60 FPS on the Pi, with basic projection mapping capabilities. The audio runs through a Pure Data patch embedded inside the binary through libpd, driving open source pd externals like Grainflow granular engine with a few objects from the ELSE library. No Pd process, no IPC, no second application; one executable.

This instrument design provides a critical artistic and technological foundation for my work. A compact physical artifact is equipped with software system that is totally free from proprietary software gives maximum capability for preservation and artistic agency. Practically speaking, the installation process becomes much easier with way less footprint.