Downloads
Jan 29, 2026
GRAMMY Museum’s Sonic Playground: Making Music Barrier-Free
Making music can feel intimidating. Some people seem to pick it up easily; others learn more slowly or were told early on that they simply weren’t musical. Many carry that assumption for years and may never try again. But the truth is that anyone can make music. Repeating patterns, exploring sound, and following curiosity can be grounding, playful, and even therapeutic. There’s no right or wrong way in.
The team at the GRAMMY Museum LA are all too familiar with this misconception. It’s part of the reason they set out to build Sonic Playground – a space that lowers the barriers to making music for visitors of all ages. “We wanted a place that encouraged people to play, regardless of whether they know an instrument or not”, says museum chief curator, Jasen Emmons. “No skills required, no talent required. Just come in, have fun, and remember how much joy there is in taking part.”
We recently visited the GRAMMY museum for a day of music, tech, creativity, and a special behind-the-scenes look at Sonic Playground. Inside, Ableton Certified Trainer Yeuda Ben-Atar kicked off proceedings with a primer on all things Ableton. Emmons followed, outlining the vision for Sonic Playground.
From there, the creators behind three of the Playground’s core exhibits took the stage. Artist and engineer Brendan Hogan explained the creation of Electric Forest, the glowing, gesture-driven sound sculpture at the heart of the room.
Musician and inventor Moldover walked us through the design of Beat Nexus and the Vocal Booth. For anyone following along at home: he has also shared a free Max for Live device that recreates the experience of Beat Nexus in Ableton Live, turning any 4-octave MIDI keyboard (or even just a mouse) into a playful plugin version of the exhibit.
Download Moldover’s Beat Nexus Max for Live Device
Requires an Ableton Live 12.3 Suite license or the free trial
Visitors explore the wide range of interactive exhibits within Sonic Playground
Spread across a series of interactive stations and a fully equipped mini-stage, Sonic Playground shifts the museum experience from passive observing to active music-making. It’s designed to demystify how songs, beats, and performances come to life, inviting guests to step directly into the creative process.
The project came together quickly. Concept meetings began in January 2024; the exhibit opened a year later. Emmons and a small team – including Moldover and Hogan – set out to create an experience that reduced typical anxieties that keep people from making music.
“Ask someone to perform, they might immediately say, I’m not musical, or my piano teacher terrified me,” Emmons says. “So how do we get people to feel the way they do when singing in the shower or in the car, where no one’s judging them?”
GRAMMY Museum Chief Curator, Jasen Emmons, outlined the vision for Sonic Playground
Beat Nexus: The Drum Circle of the Future
Moldover’s Beat Nexus exhibit adopts a collaborative approach to accessibility, emphasizing both shared, hands-on performance and individual exploration. “I’ve always wanted electronic music to look as expressive as it sounds,” he says.
He began by sketching dozens of layout ideas – grids, clusters, note patterns that would feel playful and intuitive to complete beginners. “I was thinking about what shapes would attract people to different musical patterns,” he says. “Stuff that helps people stumble into scales and chords – those structures we think of as ‘good’ in music – without having to know anything about them.”
Beat Nexus features four panels, each encouraging visitors to explore beats, bass, harmony, and melody
To build the instrument, he embedded Erae touch controllers beneath a custom-made panel, letting the hardware do the work inside while the overlayed interface remains entirely his own design. “The Erae controllers feel like giant squishy iPads,” Moldover says. “Pressure-sensitive, expressive, and they light up, which is huge when you’re approaching something you’ve never seen before. If you get a sound and a light at the same time, it’s a lot easier to understand what’s happening.”
Each of Beat Nexus’ four panels behaves differently. “The idea was to make four unique interfaces,” Moldover explains. The melody panel offers a long strip for gliding between notes, plus arpeggiation tricks. The bass panel groups notes into broad harmonic qualities – “more consonant to more dissonant.” The harmony panel works on the same principle, while the rhythm panel uses large, clearly defined pads that trigger drum sounds when pressed.
At the center of the installation sits a glowing visualizer built from a custom 3D-printed LED array. “The panel responds to incoming messages from the performance system”, Moldover says, “and it shifts into an attract mode when no one is playing.”
Under the hood, Beat Nexus runs on an Ableton Live Set filled with loops by KJ Sawka, and neutral-sounding synth patches chosen to avoid implying any particular genre. “I didn’t want people to think, ‘Oh, this is footwork,’ or ‘This is dubstep,’” Moldover notes. The feel of the instrument – the smoothness of glides, the subtle resistance of zones, the visual feedback – is achieved with custom Max for Live devices. “It’s like your smartphone experience,” he says. “You don’t see the physics behind it, but there’s tons of programming to make it feel natural.”
Moldover’s aforementioned free Max for Live device download recreates the core behaviour of Beat Nexus. “The idea is to adapt the experience for anyone with Ableton Live 12 and four-octave MIDI keyboard, ideally with pitch bend, a modulation wheel, and aftertouch,” he says. “And if you don’t have a keyboard, you play everything just by clicking around with your mouse.”
Moldover walked visitors through the design of Beat Nexus
Electric Forest: A Mixer You Can Walk Through
When the team first began imagining the Sonic Playground, nothing was defined. “We knew we needed a central object,” says Hogan. “We wanted it to feel accessible. We envisioned something anyone could enter, touch, or simply move near.”
Out of that starting point emerged Electric Forest – a grove of 16 glowing columns that respond to hand gestures and sound. Each column houses an infrared sensor and a speaker. Raise your hand and the sound swells; lower it and it fades. “We exploded a mixer’s meter bridge into 3D space,” Hogan explains.
Visitors interact with Electric Forest’s glowing gesture-controlled columns
From the outset, the installation was designed to run continuously, with no beginning, middle, or end to the composition or the way visitors interacted with it. “We brought composer Shaun Chasin onto the project,” Hogan says. “Once the musical direction was clear, Ableton Live became the obvious tool to run it. We needed software that could handle loops seamlessly, was highly automatable, and could operate without anyone sitting at a computer.”
Composing for Electric Forest meant rethinking how music behaves in space. “It’s continuously looping,” Hogan explains. “The goal is that you never hear the loop point.” Silence, too, was off the table. “If there’s no audio, the lights are out. And that looks broken.”
To recreate the meter-bridge effect seen on audio mixers, each column of light was set up to rise and fall using a custom plugin in Ableton Live, which analysed the musical waveforms and converted them into MIDI CC messages mapped to the lighting system. A Max/MSP patch handled input from the sensors inside the columns, allowing the lighting to respond seamlessly to both the music and gestures.
Autonomy was also essential. “There’s no staff intervention whatsoever,” Hogan says. The system transitions between programs using timed scripts and Max devices. “Ableton Live stops, fades elegantly, the lights change, the next scene begins. The exhibit even shifts itself into night mode.”
“The complexity was never supposed to be something visitors think about”, Hogan concludes. “You can just walk through and experience it. If people stop trying to figure it out and just enjoy it, it means I’ve done my job.”
Electric Forest’s designer, Brendan Hogan, gave visitors a behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibit
Vocal Booth: A Super-Karaoke Experience
Moldover’s Vocal Booth offers a more intimate setting, inviting visitors to experiment with their voice and explore vocal effects in a low-pressure environment. He describes the experience like “super-karaoke.”
Inside the booth, Grammy award-winning artist H.E.R. appears on video to coach you in, then an Ableton Live Set behind the scenes takes over, playing edits of well-known songs by Nirvana, Mariah Carey, or Shakira, so visitors can sing along. A custom control panel with joysticks and buttons gives singers instant access to effects like harmonies, pitch shifts, and delays.
Sonic Playground’s Vocal Booth invites visitors to explore vocal performance and sound effects
For those who’d rather not fiddle, the booth’s automated Ableton Live effects chains add chorus harmonies, automatic effect changes during key moments of the song, and end-phrase delays, all in sync with the track.
“Most people aren’t used to hearing their own voice with effects”, Moldover explains. “So we made them obvious, bold – it’s about confidence.”
Behind the scenes, EQ, gating, compression, and de-essing keep levels stable across different voices. “You can make a few people sound great, or you can make everyone sound good,” he says. “For a museum setting, good-for-everyone wins.”
For all his “super-karaoke” comparisons, Moldover confesses he’s genuinely terrified of karaoke. “So the idea was to make the experience private, supportive, and fun”, he says. “That’s what gives people confidence.”
Emmons also notes that the privacy of the vocal booth lowers people’s inhibitions. “It makes people brave,” he says. “We saw the same thing with our rap booth and the jam room.”
Career Pathways Beyond “Being the Star”
There’s also a career-focused layer to the Sonic Playground. Along one curved wall, Emmons mapped eight sectors of the music industry – business, production, design, education, health & wellness, and more – into 125 actual jobs with various mini-interviews.
“We wanted young visitors to see pathways beyond ‘be the star,’” he says. “Lighting directors, music supervisors, tour health pros – the industry is vast.” One favorite anecdote involves one of Quentin Tarantino’s music supervisors, whose career began with a chance party conversation. “Those stories open doors in people’s heads,” Emmons says.
Along a curved wall, visitors can discover the wide variety of career pathways in the music industry
While Sonic Playground aims to lower the barriers, that doesn’t lower the ceiling. Visitors get immediate feedback, but there’s depth if you want to dig. Beyond the exhibits we’ve covered here, every station offers the same invitation: try something, even if you think you can’t.
Emmons smiles when asked what success for the project looks like. “When a parent realizes their nine-year-old has a voice,” he says. “When strangers end up nodding along at the Beat Nexus. When someone leaves thinking, ‘Maybe I am musical.’ That’s the win.”
Watch the full talks from our day at GRAMMY Museum’s Sonic Playground
Talks with Yueda Ben-Atar, Jasen Emmons, and Brendan Hogan
Talk and performance with Moldover
Keep up with GRAMMY Museum & Moldover
Text and interview by Joseph Joyce
Photography by Joel Barhamand