Parsons The New School for Design constantly encourages new ways of thinking about both our immediate surroundings and the world around us — and how that can be applied to aspects of design to create something truly new. With SoundAffects, it was decided to find out how the characteristics and happenings of a single city block translate to musical composition. A wall was constructed on 5th Avenue, New York, loaded with headphone jacks and sensors to capture the light, temperature, noise, movement, connectivity, and colors, and then feed that data into continuously running audio software. Passerby could stop and plug directly into the wall, or anyone in the world could listen in via the web. The combination of sound-altering variables meant that the music you heard was unique to that particular moment, informed by real-time factors.