Soundpit — interactive sound sculptures

Play

Drag, swing and push.

Wheel

drag to spin

Pendulum

pull it back, let go

Mic

press and hold

Accordion

press, then pump side to side

These web instruments are a sketch of the real sculptures, which are made of wood and are life-sized.

The sculptures are arranged to be played together, players walk through and find something that feels natural.

About

The Soundpit is an interactive ambient sound-making playground that leverages improvisation and play to encourage people to reconnect with a childlike curiosity and dissolve the barriers that ordinarily keep strangers apart. The motions that activate our sculptures are natural and familiar — dancing, pressing buttons, twisting knobs — so music-making is intuitive for everyone.

Reuben & Jude

A partnership grown out of a shared love of bringing people together, and a drive to create spaces where that can happen.

Reuben Rasmussen

Sound designer & Sculptor

Artist and sound designer Reuben Rasmussen explores the synaesthetic relationship between audio and visual through a contemporary practice in Sound Art and Aleatoric music. Influenced by his upbringing in rural Victoria, Rasmussen’s minimalist approach infuses the audience’s multi-sensory experience with life and organic texture. After receiving the Melbourne Global Scholar’s Award (UoM) and the Zatorski Prize for Music and Arts contribution, Rasmussen went on to perform at BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) in 2024, approaching multi-channel spatialised audio in a live space. Whilst completing a Bachelor of Music (Interactive Composition), he also collaborated with the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, responding to Fernand Léger’s Composition with Fruit (1938) with a Sound-Art composition.

Jude Kieran

Engineer & Sculptor

Jude Kieran is an engineer and designer who combines mechanical, electrical and software engineering to craft kinetic sculptures. Driven by a belief that curiosity is our most powerful tool for creating a more empathetic world, his work urges people to let it guide more of their everyday lives. This philosophy first took shape in his quirky custom bike builds and his award-winning capstone project: a chaos-based amusement park ride. Teaching at STEM education provider Young Engineers, he sparked curiosity in others, designing a gamified coding and robotics program for Year 7 students built around intuitive, play-based learning. Most recently, Kieran co-created Soundpit, bringing these ideas to the public with its first interactive sound sculpture, which debuted at Mach 1.