Designing public interactions through sound with Michael Baker

In this podcast you will learn how sound-led public artworks can turn everyday places into shared, playable environments. 

In this interview Michael Baker is the Sound Director at Daily tous les jours we explore some of the thinking behind Daily Tous Les Jours’ public artworks. 

Daily tous les jours is known for large-scale participatory works such as Musical Swings, as well as their book Strangers Need Strange Moments Together, which reflects on designing interaction in public space.

This interview is the first in a series that focuses on media art works in public space.

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

• Why music acts as “social glue” in public space and how it supports relationality
• How the Musical Swings series of works map movement and synchrony into musical structure
• Designing interactions that are legible without instructions
• Low-tech prototyping methods (before code) that test the real experience
• The differences between touring works and permanent outdoor installations
• Common failure points in public work: weather, wear, and mechanical/electronic overlap
• Why the “artwork” is ultimately the people using the piece, together

 

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Chapters

• (00:00:00) Finding the hidden rhythm: sound between chaos & musical order
• (00:00:24) Welcome + acknowledgement of country
• (00:00:48) Series kickoff: Media art in public spaces (meet Daily tous les jours)
• (00:01:40) Michael Baker’s role: Why audio is the perfect public-space interface
• (00:02:44) “Make sure it makes music”: Music as social glue & pre‑verbal play
• (00:05:24) Accidental encounters: The magic of unexpected public art
• (00:06:22) Case study: Musical swings—wonder, all ages, all walks of life
• (00:07:38) Sync & sway: How the swings create emergent harmony (tech + behavior)
• (00:09:56) From mirror neurons to intimacy: Why we copy each other
• (00:10:41) Interactive pavement: Grid rhythms, emergent rules & dancing together
• (00:11:48) No instructions needed: Designing clear, simple gestures
• (00:13:45) Prototyping at scale: Iteration, tape-on-the-ground tests & deadlines
• (00:16:13) Tweak vs deliver: Working with clients, museums & touring constraints
• (00:17:51) Testing with fresh eyes: First-time users as the real benchmark
• (00:19:25) Temporary vs permanent: Durability, public “hacks,” and extreme weather
• (00:21:41) Platforms & toolchains: MAX/MSP, TouchDesigner, and choosing what fits
• (00:23:50) What public media art really is: The artwork is the people
• (00:25:29) Wrap-up, thanks, and share the show

About Daily tous les jours

Daily tous les jours is a Montreal-based art and design studio that creates interactive installations in public spaces. Founded in 2010 by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, the studio is known for large-scale participatory works such as Musical Swings. Their projects use technology, music and movement to bring strangers together and transform everyday urban spaces into sites of collective experience.

About Michael Baker

Michael Baker is the Sound Director at Daily tous les jours, where he oversees the sonic landscape of the studio’s interactive installations. In his role, he develops sound palettes, generative compositional systems and integrated audio environments that respond to movement and collective behaviour in public space.

Michael holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in electroacoustics from Concordia University. An accomplished electroacoustic composer, his work has been presented at international festivals including the 60x60 Festival (Canada/US), the Livewire Festival (Maryland), and the Canadian Electroacoustic Community Symposium (Montreal).

Takeaways from this interview with Michael Baker

Music as social glue

“Music is this glue for a lot of things…”

Baker describes music as a fast way to lower social barriers in public space. When people share a sonic environment, they enter a common rhythm without needing conversation. In busy sites where attention is fragmented, music creates an immediate shared context for connection.

Sound keeps the public space social

“Your eyes remain free…”

Unlike screen-based interaction, sound does not demand a fixed gaze. It allows participants to remain visually aware of others around them. This keeps the interaction social rather than isolating, preserving eye contact, shared glances and collective awareness.

Design so it needs no instructions

“We should design the objects and the interaction together… we don’t have to write the rules down.”

For the studio, instructionless design is not an aesthetic choice but a functional one. Clear physical affordances and immediate sonic feedback allow people to learn through play. In public space, where no one expects to encounter art, clarity must come from the interaction itself.

Synchrony creates relationship

“If you swing for a little while, you're not quite strangers anymore.”

The Musical Swings reward coordination. Shared rhythm becomes a subtle social bridge. Participants don’t need to speak; the harmony makes their connection audible. Synchronisation shifts the space from parallel activity to collective experience.

Emergent music from minimal systems

“As soon as you get more people… it becomes this sort of emergent, repetitive melody.”

Each individual action remains simple and legible. Complexity arises only when multiple people participate. The design principle is clear: keep the personal gesture intuitive, and allow group behaviour to generate richness.

Prototype with the simplest possible tools

“Masking tape on the ground and a MIDI keyboard…”

Early testing does not require finished technology. By stripping away code and polish, the studio focuses on the core question: does this feel intuitive and rewarding? If the interaction fails at this level, technology will not fix it.

Build for weather, wear and unpredictability

“If there’s something that has to move… and there’s a cable attached… there’s wear and tear.”

Public installations operate under constant stress. Moving parts, cables and electronics meet rain, snow and repeated use. The challenge is not just designing the interaction, but designing for durability, failure and long-term maintenance. 

The artwork is really the people.

For Baker, the physical installation is a platform, not the finished work. The artwork emerges through participation. Success is measured not by the object itself, but by the quality of shared experience it generates.

Links from this podcast 

• Learn more about Daily Tous Les Jours
• Learn more about 21 Balançoires (musical swings)
• Read Strangers Need Strange Moments Together   

Edited transcript of this interview with Michael Baker

Music as social glue in public space

This conversation explores how sound-led public artworks can make public space more accessible, playful and socially connected—especially through intuitive, pre-verbal musical interaction.

Robin: Can you please describe your role at Daily Tous Les Jours, and how sound fits into the work that the studio does?

Michael Baker: Yeah, absolutely. I’m the audio director at Daily Tous Les Jours. That title has evolved over the years. I was doing audio edits and I was doing a lot of repairs on the swings. I was doing whatever work they could throw my way.

Michael Baker: But we’ve had more and more projects, and I took on more of the compositional work, and also the software side of things when the software is integrated with the audio. The work that we do very often incorporates audio because, in general, it’s a great tool for interactivity. Your eyes remain free. If it’s a public space and we’ve got multiple people interacting, they can look around and they can interact with each other, which is the really appealing part of it for us.

Robin: As I was reading Strangers need strange moments together about the studio’s work, there’s a line that keeps coming back to me. One of the early chapters finishes with: “When it comes down to it, make sure it makes music.” Why is that so important to the work?

Michael Baker: I do think that music is this glue for a lot of things. It seems like we automatically lower our inhibitions, or our social shields, a little bit in a musical space—where there’s either a performance that we’re listening to, or even more so, a performance we’re participating in.

Michael Baker: If our big project is trying to make these public spaces feel more accessible for everyone, and more like a space where people can mix and mingle, then music becomes this shortcut to—intimacy isn’t quite the right word—but relationality. It’s a shortcut to relationality because I’m hearing the same thing as you’re hearing, and in fact I’m maybe doing something that is changing what you’re hearing, and you’re also doing that. So we’re put in relationship by the music as well.

Robin: One memory I’ve got of my five-year-old granddaughter, when she was staying with us, was her dancing—moving to music—before she had words. It was just one of those things like: okay, this sound–music–movement thing is such an embedded part of our brains. It’s not even a social thing. It’s something that’s really part of what it means to be human.

Michael Baker: I totally agree. And I think you put your finger on something with your granddaughter. It seems like it’s pre-verbal, or it’s something we connect to without having to bring too much. It’s intuitive. It’s really easy to access a state of play with music, because you don’t need to engage your logical, interpretive mind.

Robin: It’s also interesting in public spaces, because things like lines and projections don’t work particularly well during the day—and most public spaces, people are in them during the day. Focusing on sound and music first makes it much more accessible during the day as well.

Michael Baker: It poses its own set of challenges, but certainly, making the interaction about light and projection makes it harder in the daytime, for sure.

Encountering participatory artworks by accident

Many interactive public artworks are discovered unexpectedly. This section focuses on what it means to encounter an artwork “in the wild”, without prior context, and why surprise can be a design advantage.

Robin: A great aspect of art in public places is that participants often encounter it almost by accident. What do you think about an encounter that happens unexpectedly?

Michael Baker: I think that’s the ideal encounter, for me anyway. It’s the same thing as going into a movie you haven’t read about, you haven’t seen the previews for, and it’s a good movie. You have to be open to the experience, and everything is going to be a surprise.

Michael Baker: We have real, unexamined expectations about what we will encounter in a public space. Shocking those expectations—expanding the possibilities—it’s a little bit of magic. You have a real idea about what can and can’t happen here, and suddenly that barrier is broken: the barrier of what’s possible in the moment.

How Musical Swings turns movement into music

Musical Swings is a large-scale participatory sound artwork that maps movement into musical notes, and rewards synchrony through a change in musical structure.

Robin: One of the really well-known pieces from the studio is Musical Swings. You’ve talked about working on that before. What keeps surprising you about how people experience that piece?

Michael Baker: Maybe it’s just because it’s been around for so long. I’ve known it for so long, and I’ve spent so much time taking apart and reassembling swings, that for me it becomes a little mechanistic. For me it’s simple: you swing on it, it makes sounds. It’s mundane for me.

Michael Baker: The thing that re-inhabits it with magic is when I’m on a new site installing it—or, it’s not me usually, it’s other people on the team—but you get to see the magic all again through the eyes of new people. One of the exciting things is that it seems to hold that magic for people of all ages, and from all walks of life. At any moment you’ll see people of all ages and from all walks of life swinging side by side. It’s a beautiful feeling to see that.

Robin: There’s a synchronous element to it. Can you explain what technically happens with that, and why you think that naturally happens within the interaction?

Michael Baker: On the technical side, a basic rundown is: it’s three, maybe four different colours of seat, and every colour connotes an instrument—piano, harp, guitar, and vibraphone, I think, a sort of mallet instrument. When you swing, the higher you swing, the higher the note will play, and it plays right as you change direction. As you get to the top of your swing, it makes a ding.

Michael Baker: So anyone on a swing, it’s a pretty simple soundtrack—it’s just kind of ding, depending on your height. But as soon as you get more people on the swings, it becomes this emergent, repetitive melody. And the other thing that happens is: when people are synced up—swinging at the same cadence, and the top of the swing is at the same time—these arpeggios will play. So rather than one note, it’ll be four notes. It’s a small change, but in the context of a minimalist interaction, you notice it.

Michael Baker: People tend to swing together. I think part of it is physics: if you have pendulums on the same mechanical structure, they’re going to slowly line up. But the other thing is people seem to want to do that naturally as well. I’m not sure why, but people end up swinging together.

Michael Baker: And when that happens, it reinforces the relationality of the interaction. It makes you hyper-aware of the people you’re with, whether you know them or not. Part of what works really well with the swings is how you take a seat amongst strangers, and if you swing for a little while, you’re not quite strangers anymore. You’re something a little different—not yet friends, but maybe you’ve taken a step in that direction.

Robin: The researchers behind what I’m about to talk about sometimes get questioned, but some people talk about humans having “monkey neurons”—that we literally have neurons that copy the people around us. I think that’s part of what you’re talking about too.

Michael Baker: Right—the mirror neurons, and ideas about how that might be where human empathy emerges from: how we copy each other. It’s very easy to feel what someone else is doing in their body when you see them do it, because your mirror neurons are hinting to your body what that would feel like—what’s happening. That’s another strange shortcut to some kind of intimacy.

Robin: Musical Swings is one body of work. There’s another body of work around the interactive pavement. Is that synchronicity happening in the pavement works?

Michael Baker: There isn’t a reward coded right into the interaction the way there is with the swings, but it’s quantised on a grid. Basically, there’s a rhythm that you can’t hear, but when you’re triggering a bunch of the sensors, the rhythm emerges. We’re trying to find that line between chaos and musical organisation, where we still give you a whole bunch of control over what you’re doing, but it’s going to sound good with other people.

Michael Baker: That sets up a scenario where people can predict it. They understand what the rhythm is, and they start interacting according to that rhythm. It’s like an emergent rule of interaction: we’re going to move to the rhythm, and suddenly we’re kind of dancing together. It’s not the exact same syncing of gestures that the swings have, but it is some kind of syncing.

Designing interactive public artworks without instructions

This section focuses on legibility: how the object, feedback and environment can teach the “rules” of an interaction quickly—without text panels or instructions.

Robin: The pieces don’t have instructions either. There’s a moment where someone goes, “Oh, it’s making a sound.” If I do this, I make another sound. Because it’s essentially a binary to start with—someone does something and then the sound happens. Have you ever felt like a piece needed instructions?

Michael Baker: One of our fundamental design criteria is: we should design the objects and the interaction together in such a way that we don’t have to write the rules down. Either the affordance of the objects in the space suggests the interaction, or when you do something in the space—or with the object—you learn the rules very quickly.

Michael Baker: The interactions are mostly fairly simple, and the complexity comes more from the different places you can interact, and interacting with different people. Any one interaction is a fairly simple gesture.

Robin: I think that’s one of the real strengths of the studio’s work: that beautiful simplicity, but at the same time building up very complex things because of the group interactions.

Michael Baker: It’s challenging. Sometimes what feels like a simple interaction—well, the complexity can lead to a point where no one is quite sure what it is that they’re doing. If there’s a lot of different sounds going on, it’s like: certainly something is happening, but what is it I’m doing?

Prototyping, maintenance and the realities of public installations

This section covers low-tech prototyping before code, touring versus permanent installations, common failure points in outdoor interactive works, and the tools used behind the scenes.

Robin: So you always have to design with that in mind—some way of highlighting what it is I specifically am doing, or what you specifically are doing. This is a whole series around media and public spaces. I’ve talked to other people about this moment of: how do you prototype something that, say, is across a five-storey building? Often it comes back as: well, there’s no real prototyping. You think about what the risks are, and focus on those. How does the studio prototype, Michael?

Michael Baker: For us, prototyping is pretty essential. Our work is really iterative along a whole bunch of parallel lines. There’ll be prototyping object design, and then on my side, prototyping different sounds and different rules of interaction. Early on, we try to do it as simply as possible.

Michael Baker: Often that’s no code. It’s tape on the ground: “These are the spots you touch, and this is…” and then a keyboard—so masking tape on the ground and a MIDI keyboard playing. It’s a use-your-imagination scenario. The question is: is there something there? It doesn’t take much to get a feeling for whether there’s a nugget we want to pursue.

Michael Baker: For the sound palette or musical direction, it’s often starting from musical references, or even preset sounds. We try to make it as easy as possible to triangulate what the interesting nugget is about the interaction. It’s one prototype after another, inching closer to what becomes the final.

Michael Baker: And the final delivery is also like: we install it on site and it’s all done, but we can still tweak the sounds or the rules of interaction. Actually, it works a little better if we do this. It feels like if we didn’t have a specific date to deliver, we would just iterate forever.

Robin: Work’s quite often never finished. Someone asked me: “When do you know when a piece is resolved?” And I went, “I actually don’t understand what you mean by resolved.” I had a deadline and I had to get something I was happy with.

Michael Baker: That’s it. Exactly.

Robin: As you’re talking about tweaking once it’s set up: galleries hate that behaviour, because they’re used to a piece coming into a space as a finished thing. But your clients—commissioners—are often people working in a built environment that generally stays the same once it’s done. How do you tell them about that tweaking?

Michael Baker: It depends a lot on their comfort levels. We put one of our musical pavement series projects in Canada, in Cambridge, Ontario, and the people that brought us were engaged with the process. They had ideas and requests: “What if we did this?” They wanted to see what else we could do.

Michael Baker: We’ve also had a piece, I heard there was a secret chord, commissioned by the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC). That was a piece that really needed to be set up and delivered, and then it toured to different art galleries and art spaces. It had to be: set it up, take it down, it’s the same every time.

Michael Baker: It was an interesting experience because the team of techs were so professional and so good that the installs were easy. There was setting levels and tweaking acoustics—not getting feedback and things like that—but it wasn’t a moment to change the way it works.

Robin: When you’re doing early prototyping, are you working with peers in the studio, or do you get other people—who have no knowledge of the project—involved?

Michael Baker: Both. We start internally, but at some point—maybe because of our criteria of not having instructions—we need people who are encountering the project or the prototype for the first time, to get a real read on the experience. That introductory encounter in the wild is really important.

Michael Baker: What does it do? What am I supposed to do here? What did that do? If the interaction rules are unclear, or there are questions about how it works beyond “How did you do that?”, then we know we need to tweak something. We need to simplify, or make something more explicit through the design.

Robin: You keep returning to: if someone’s new to this, what do they experience? I was going to say “learn” the piece, but “pick up” the piece is maybe a better way of putting it. What’s a big difference between the temporary work and the more permanent work the studio is doing?

Michael Baker: It’s a different set of challenges. With temporary work, the logistical challenges are around how easy it is, how much time it takes to set up and take down, how likely we are to break something during install and deinstall, and how adaptable it is to the site.

Michael Baker: With permanent pieces, in some ways we always know things are going to break when we put them out in the wild for long enough. We do our best to predict what it will be, how long it’ll take, and to plan around that. But there are many surprises.

Michael Baker: The public has a genius for subverting our intended usage—hacking it in a way—and sometimes that means things get worn out in a way we didn’t predict.

Robin: Is there a pattern to that tech failure? Is it something that repeatedly goes wrong?

Michael Baker: Quite often it’s where the mechanical and the electronic overlap—those are the failures I notice most, because I’m implicated in them. If something has to move a bunch, but it also has a cable attached to it, or a sensor attached to it, there’s naturally going to be wear and tear.

Michael Baker: And because we live in Canada, and we install in Canada often, there are questions like: what is it going to do when it’s 20 below, some water gets in, and it freezes overnight? What’s it going to do when it’s 30 degrees and the sun’s beating down on it?

Robin: So it’s possibly that temperature thing that causes you the most hassle.

Michael Baker: Our touring projects, we try to bulletproof as much as possible. Our permanent projects are often… we don’t like entirely repeating ourselves. We change things because it’s more fun. Last time we installed something similar, we’ll think: wouldn’t it be cool if it did this instead?

Michael Baker: So we’re always changing things, and it’s how our team wants to work. But it also means every permanent installation feels like a new test of the redesign—on the interaction side, on the mechanical side, and in terms of longevity. It’s a matter of time until we figure out something else we can improve for next time.

Robin: Some people have talked to me about this as developing a platform—Musical Swings or the pavement works as a platform: a core set of technologies and approaches that you apply in different situations. Is that what’s happening, or does a new pavement piece need a really different set of sensors and technology to support it?

Michael Baker: With these families of pieces, we get to repeat the good ideas. We get to build on what we’ve learned, so we’re often not starting from scratch. Things change—sensors stop being developed, and different sites have different requirements—so everything has little adaptations.

Michael Baker: But I’m not the only one in the studio who loves when we are starting something from scratch, or starting something that feels like a total departure, where everything is in question and open to exploration.

Robin: I decided I wasn’t going to ask you this, but I’m interested to know: what platforms are in the background of the pieces?

Michael Baker: The audio stuff is generally with Max/MSP, and when we’re doing light control, we’ve used Processing mostly. Through the years we’re using TouchDesigner. The combination of Max/MSP and Max for Live is great for prototyping—changing audio parameters goes very quickly.

Michael Baker: We’ve developed in openFrameworks. There have been a couple of projects that used Unity, I think, or Unreal Engine—projects I obviously wasn’t involved in, because I can’t name them with certainty. But in general, we try to pick the software that is most easy to adapt to our needs, and the needs of the project.

Robin: The lovely thing about what we do is it’s always a moving game. Lots of people get concerned about media work because it needs to be maintained. Japanese gardens—the act of maintaining them is part of the act of what you do with them.

Robin: I’ve started to wonder whether we can build that kind of thinking into media work too—thinking about the artwork through a circular lens, and what happens when it’s no more. Sometimes with media works it’s sound or video: it’s always digital, whereas these pieces are physical.

Michael Baker: An object that can be loved in a different way, or an object that’s easy to repurpose—melt down, take apart, and build into something else—so it can again be used and loved.

Robin: What’s one thing you’d really like people to understand about media work in public spaces?

Michael Baker: I would say—less about media art in general and more about art pieces—it’s that the artwork is really the people. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. The key is people in this space, people together in this space, exploring it.

Michael Baker: Less now, but we were socialised to think about art as a thing to appreciate and not engage with. We as a culture have started questioning that. But all of our pieces take for granted the fact that there is no artwork without a person there to play with it or interact with it—and hopefully more than one person.