ondaBLAM
What does a DJ set look like when the room is silent? A listening event built around a silent disco, and a live visual system that turns the music, the crowd, and my own body into a desktop of windows.
- The brief
- Ambient Body
- A desktop as a stage
- Live data sources
- Getting people to connect
- Summary
1. The brief
ondaBLAM started as a proposal for BLAM, a space, café and workshop in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The idea was an afternoon event with a different format from what the space usually hosts: something music-driven, but with a twist. Instead of booking a DJ and pointing them at a dance floor, we decided to build an installation around the act of listening itself.
There was a catch: BLAM cannot use speakers. On paper, that kills a music event before it starts. But the rule asks a better question than the default club night ever would: if the music cannot be in the room, it has to go straight into your ears, and listening itself has to be the plan. So the constraint became the format: a silent disco with a cultural focus, streamed to everyone's own headphones.
The silent disco format introduces a problem of its own: without sound in the room, nothing invites you in. There is no shared signal telling you where the music is, how fast it goes, or that anything is happening at all. The visuals had to carry that role, and they had to reward the people who connected.
2. Ambient Body
The centerpiece of the event, titled Ambient Body, starts from the tension between exposing yourself and being perceived. To enjoy the music, attendees put on their headphones and enter into direct contact with it, while a series of visuals about introspection are projected on the back wall.
Ambient Body draws directly on the work of Filipino artist Chia Amisola, who uses the term "internet ambient": redirecting attention toward what normally stays invisible, focusing on the visual language of the internet and the interfaces that represent it. Ambient Body operates from that same logic, but uses it to play with the idea of exposure, of knowing you are being watched, with a certain exhibitionist tone.
The visuals are a set of screens showing biometric data, measured in real time through several sensors. They translate the strictly physiological and interior onto multiple axes: seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, almost voyeuristic. Are you listening to the music, or have you been snooping for a while without noticing?
3. A desktop as a stage
Technically, the piece is a single fullscreen web page styled as an operating system. Five windows open on a black desktop, all in monochrome blue, all set in Andale Mono, everything lowercase:
- now playing: the current track and artist
- bpm analysis: real-time beat detection from the audio
- heartbeat: my live heart rate
- webcam: a feed of the booth
- online presence: a slideshow of images pulled from my own website
The windows do not appear at once. A timeline assigns each one a delay, so the desktop assembles itself over the opening of the set: webcam first, now playing shortly after, then bpm analysis, heartbeat, and finally online presence. The boot sequence becomes part of the show, and the delays stay editable from a small config panel during the event.
A single global variable controls the lightness of the blue across every window. The main page broadcasts it to each iframe, so the whole desktop can be dimmed or pushed brighter as one surface, following the energy of the set.
4. Live data sources
Now playing. The DJ software writes the current track to a text file, which the page polls every couple of seconds. When the title changes, the text flips in with a split-flap animation, flashes white, and the system searches the iTunes API for the cover art (track plus artist first, then artist alone as a fallback). The artwork never appears as an image: it is sampled pixel by pixel and redrawn as ASCII characters, with a very slow pan and zoom so the texture keeps moving. When nothing is playing, the window falls back to an ambient slideshow and declares itself station_idle.
BPM analysis. A second window listens to the audio and draws four stacked graphs on canvas: beat, tone, frequencies, and match (how certain the detector is about its current tempo estimate). Large thin Helvetica labels sit over the monospaced grid, and every trace uses the same blue scale, so the analysis reads as one instrument rather than four.
Heartbeat. My Apple Watch streams heart rate through Pulsoid into the third window. This is the most literal piece of Ambient Body: the DJ's pulse, exposed on the wall. The cardiogram is not drawn as a line; each sample becomes a character, denser symbols for stronger deflections, so the ECG and its trend are typeset rather than plotted. The current reading sits in the corner as a large light number, labelled plainly as a live reading from the watch.
Webcam and online presence. The webcam turns the watching around: the booth is on display, and so is anyone looking at it. The last window cycles through photographs from the 404 pages of my website, switching at random between full ASCII conversion and a duotone blue treatment with the same slow pan and zoom. It is the least literal window, an ambient trace of an online self, and it balances the density of the others.
On top of all this, a Clippy-style assistant pops up with short comments. The messages are contextual: it checks which windows are currently visible and picks accordingly. If the webcam is up it might say "damn you look sweaty"; if the bpm window is open, "track id??"; if the heartbeat spikes, it notices. The desktop also misbehaves on a slow clock: every minute or two a random window flashes white, holds it, and settles back into blue. The system keeps drawing attention to itself, which is exactly what visuals at a silent event need to do.
5. Getting people to connect
While the visuals ran on the wall, a live DJ set was playing the whole time. It just was not in the air: the audio system was coded to behave as a silent disco. Instead of renting headphone hardware, the set was broadcast as a self-hosted audio stream served from my own laptop over a dedicated local Wi-Fi network named RADIO, and everyone listened on their own phone and headphones.
The hardest part of that setup is not the technology, it is motivating people to put something in their ears. Connecting was made as frictionless as possible, with a web front end at radio.hectormangas.com walking people through two steps: join the RADIO network, then open the stream. Both steps have their own QR code, so once one person is in, they can pass the connection along to the people next to them. Posters around the space repeated the same instructions, and communication before the event set expectations clearly: what a silent disco is, what music would play, bring a charged phone and headphones.
The space itself was split in two. The visual zone with the silent disco sits at the back, with the piece projection-mapped onto the far wall: the image fitted around the objects in front of it, with black masked areas where the wall should stay dark, so the desktop reads as part of the room rather than a rectangle floating on it. That corner also gets a bit less light and some protection for the people who connect. The front stays a normal café: if you would rather chat than listen, there is room for that too, and the listening happens within a defined window rather than all evening.
The first edition, in April 2026, ran as a pilot on my own equipment. If the format works, the goal is to make BLAM technically independent so they can repeat it without me, potentially as a takeover series with rotating DJs.
6. Summary
ondaBLAM turned the constraint of a space that cannot use speakers into a listening format, and turned the visuals of a silent event into its shared signal. Ambient Body renders the set as a fake operating system where the track, the tempo, the crowd and my own pulse run as live processes: an interface about being perceived, watched by a room deciding whether to listen. Everything is plain web technology (HTML, canvas, a text file, and two public APIs), and even the silent disco itself was code rather than hardware: a live DJ set streamed over a local network to the audience's own headphones. The whole system ran from my laptop on site, and everything on screen was real.
