Chapter 28

Movable Party

Wendy Hsu, Steven Kemper, Josef Cameron Taylor, Linda Wei, and Jacob Alden Sargent

Movable Party is a bicycle-powered system for participatory musical performance designed and built by Los Angeles-based maker collective, Movable Parts. Taking design inspirations from Taiwan’s street sound innovations, the collective made the system to instigate ad hoc, emplaced social interactions as a form of creative friction against urban sprawl. The system consists of three stationary bicycles, each equipped with rear-wheel hub motors that generate enough energy to power a medium-sized public address system. The bicycles are also equipped with sensors to track rear-wheel speed as well as rider position. Mapped to musical parameters in software, sensor data from riders’ gestures and movements transform the bicycles into interactive musical instruments.