Sound You Can See
Building a 10,000 sq/ft art and maker space where the speakers are original paintings, the sound is shaped by DSP, and audio becomes animation.
Outcome
Opened Satori Gallery featuring 20 original musician portrait DML flat-panel speakers driven by a 5-channel DSP audio system, a full wood/metal/leather maker space, and recurring Oscilloscope Art events where audio channels drive real-time visual animations.
The Building
In 2018, I found a 10,000 sq/ft building in Batesville, Arkansas and bought it.
The original plan was simple: a space to make things. A wood shop, a metal shop, somewhere to do leather work without covering the living room in saddle soap. The building had the square footage, the ceiling height, and the bones for something more interesting.
It evolved.
The Speaker Problem
The event space — about 3,000 sq/ft of the total — needed sound. The obvious path was conventional speakers: mount some boxes, run cables, call it done. But a conventional PA system in a space covered in original artwork felt like a missed opportunity.
I had been aware of DML (Distributed Mode Loudspeaker) technology for years — flat panels that vibrate across their entire surface to produce sound, rather than pushing air through a cone. The physics are different: instead of a point source throwing waves in one direction, the whole panel becomes a radiating surface, producing remarkably even room coverage. No hot spots, no dead zones — consistent sound pressure across the entire space.
The AAS in Electronic Engineering from ITT Technical Institute (1990) came back here. I understood the signal chain, the DSP requirements, the crossover design. I knew how to make this work.
When the Solution Is Also the Art
The insight that changed the project: DML panels can be made from rigid foam board. Foam board can be painted. Musicians have faces.
I made 20 DML flat-panel speakers from 4-foot foam panels and painted original canvas portraits of music legends directly onto the speaker faces — Elvis, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, 2Pac, Biggie, and others. Each panel is simultaneously a working loudspeaker and an original piece of art.
The event space now has 20 musician portraits looking down at you. You don't notice they're speakers until the music starts. Then you realize the music is coming from everywhere — from the faces.
The 5-channel audio system runs through a DSP unit that shapes the signal for perfectly balanced stereo across the entire space. No listener position sounds dramatically different from any other. That's the constraint the DML physics solves, and the DSP finishes.
The Maker Space
The remaining 4,500 sq/ft is a full working maker space.
Wood: table saw, band saw, lathe, jointer, planer. I've built sculptures and furniture here — things that take time and reward the patience.
Metal: welding, cutting, fabrication. Metal sculptures alongside the wood work.
Leather: this is the one I return to. I've been hand saddle-stitching from raw leather long enough that the bags, backpacks, and luggage coming out of the space are things I'm genuinely proud of. Saddle stitching — two needles, locked stitch, no machine — means every piece is repairable, essentially indestructible if done correctly, and takes long enough that you don't rush the design decisions.
Plastics: casting and forming to support the other work.
Oscilloscope Art Events
The DML system opened a different experiment.
Oscilloscope art uses audio signals as X and Y axis inputs to a CRT oscilloscope, creating Lissajous patterns — geometric animations driven by the frequency relationships in the audio. Left channel goes to X, right channel goes to Y, and the oscilloscope draws whatever relationship exists between them in real time.
Satori Gallery has hosted Oscilloscope Art/Music events where this is the entire performance: music composed and performed specifically to drive the visual output, with artists watching Lissajous patterns evolve as the composition moves through different frequency relationships. The synthesis of electronic engineering, musical composition, and visual art is harder to find in a single room than it should be.
Art Prints
The musician portraits from the DML panel series are reproduced as art prints on museum-quality paper. Available through the gallery's online presence at facebook.com/BatesvilleArt. The gallery continues to hold private exhibitions from the Batesville space.
Why This Matters to the AI Work
Directly, Satori Gallery is a side project — a creative space, a place to make things with hands rather than code.
Indirectly, it's evidence of the same orientation that shows up across the technical work: an interest in where different disciplines meet, a bias toward building rather than describing, and a specific kind of attention to craft whether the medium is leather, sound, or a language model system prompt.
The AI art direction work — 300+ articles on art history and generative AI, systematic prompt vocabulary for visual style, aesthetic consistency across model outputs — comes from the same place. You have to care about what good looks like, and you have to have seen enough of it, before you can reliably direct a model to produce it. The gallery is where that caring shows up in three dimensions.
Online presence: facebook.com/BatesvilleArt