Pepsi Pavilion Sound System

Designed by David Tudor as an “instrument” in its own right, working with Gordon Mumma and Fred Waldhauer, the Pepsi Pavilion’s sound system distributed audio across 37 speakers arranged in a rhombic grid behind the Pavilion’s spherical mirror, driven by as many as 32 simultaneous inputs spanning the full audio-frequency range. Input sources included 16 quarter-track monaural tape recorders, 16 microphone preamplifiers, wave generators, and a record player; Tudor assembled 37 program tapes from a library of more than 500 collected sounds — insect calls, whale song, thunder, NASA recordings, and Smithsonian bird recordings among them — that supplied the system’s raw material. Signals could be modulated (AM or FM), filtered, or left unchanged, then distributed to the dome’s speakers in three distinct modes: line sound (rapid speaker-to-speaker switching), point sound (isolated single-speaker activation), and immersion sound (omnidirectional distribution across all 37 speakers). Distribution patterns could be pre-programmed or driven manually at the Pepsi Pavilion Sound Modifier Console, the system’s playable control surface.