SOUND POLICE AFRIKABURN 2025
You’re in the middle of the tankwa karoo desert, having a blast.
But how hot is this party, really ?
The Sound Police are here to help !
To support (and improve on) Afrikaburn’s “sound policy”, we're bringing a GIANT decibel meter to the playa.
Mounted on a mobile scissor lift, it will travel to where the party is, rise up in the air, and support musical vehicles and stages while letting dancers know how hot the party really is.
The Sound Police will be built around a 4’500kg scissor lift, paneled with LED-studded wooden sheets. And when we say LED-studded, we mean it: with 6,400 individually addressable LEDs (which means we are using half a kilometer of LED strings, hand-mounting each one in its own socket)
SUPPORT US
Born in the dusty brains of a serial burner, the Sound Police project is hosted and supported by Camp Why Not
The Sound Police be active mostly at night, and around dusk and dawn while overall luminosity is still low.
Early in the week, it’ll stick pretty close to the “dumb” decibel meter it's based on, but will be displaying quirks, easter eggs, and fun stuff that may appear to be glitches ... or not!
As the week progresses, the display will get more and more creative, going to full-time craziness and beautiful sound-reactive animations.
Designed to last
The overall design is fully modular, so that the individual panels can be repurposed in other configurations for other, future art projects.
No really, SUPPORT US !
EUR 10,000
Milestones
Overall architecture finalized
Proof of concept and early prototyping done, complete with functional small scale versions
All relevant control electronics, software and operating systems selected and largely tested
Overall budget almost finalized (a few surprises with hit-and-miss import duties, and the high rental and transportation cost of the scissor lift)
Loads of advice received from people who built projects like the Rainbow Bridge (Burning Man), or Prometheus (Afrikaburn)
Created some custom, dedicated media (custom pixel fonts, virtual grids, dot-matrix animations). Still a lot of work to do here
A first test panel is assembled and being thoroughly tested: electrical and signal wiring and soldering, load testing, fusing (remember, 6’400 LEDs!!), resilience to poor handling, … etc. ==>
