A/V Happy Hour displays art

An elaborate spectacle complete with audio and visual, took place Thursday night in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts.

A/V Happy Hour was put on by students from the School of Fine Arts and telecommunications department. It featured a varied array of projects as well as a main stage where DJs and musicians performed.

“Everyone is doing their own projects,” said senior Benjamin Gibson. “It’s a way of interacting with the environment.”

Gibson is a senior majoring in math and telecommunications and featured his project “Soup cans, Stairs, Sound, Light.”

The acts featured on the main stage were heavily delayed due to technical difficulties.

The public came and went as they checked out the various projects that were on display inside and outside of the auditorium, which could occupy 300 people. About one-third of the room was full at any given time.

Around 8:40 p.m., the first act took the main stage. Robert Lyon and Evan Bogunia put on a show of improvised visuals and music. Both of them had laptops set up, as well as iPod touches that were modified to adjust electronic frequencies of sound.

“The concept is similar to how a Wii remote works,” Lyon said.

Lyon also had his own audio project on display, hidden away in a corner of the auditorium.

He and another student in the psychology department put together a project that measures the beat or pattern of the firing of neurons and scales them to measurements in sound. The firing of neurons, which is too fast for the human ear to pick up, was represented at a slower scale for the sake of the project.

26-year-old Jordan Munson, who is a lecturer in music and arts technology at IU-Purdue University Indianapolis, came down from Indianapolis to perform his piece “Segments of Time.”

“It’s good to see a lot of students interested in music,” Munson said. “There is actually a usage of a lot of new technology.”