Artist-Musician Sculpts the Sound of the Sun

Craig Colorusso is chasing the sun, not in search of a break from the winter chill or a good tan but in search of music.

The Massachusetts-based artist and musician's newest project is sound sculpture called sun boxes, which rely solely on the sun to create music.

Each sun box has its own printed circuit board with a recorded guitar note programmed to play continuously in a loop. The box also has an amplifier and a solar panel on top to capture the sun's energy. The entire installation consists of 20 sun boxes -- each with a different-length loop of music, so when they all play together they overlap, and the music piece they create is never the same.

Together, the notes from the 20 sun boxes create a B-flat chord, Colorusso explained.

"They're entirely dependent on the sun," he told AOL News. "When the clouds move over the sun, the whole piece becomes really quiet. And then the brighter the sun gets, the more volume there is."

A self-described "old rocker," Colorusso grew up in Connecticut and began playing guitar as a teenager.

"When I was 14, I could play the first 20 seconds of every Led Zeppelin song," he joked.

However, he says grew tired of the pop-rock of the '80s. He wondered, "Can Van Halen sing about anything other than chicks?" and turned to punk and modern composition. That switch, Colorusso said, laid the foundation for sun boxes.

Another inspiration for the interactive sound installation came from Colorusso's experience touring the country with his band, China Pig, in the '90s.

"We were playing in awful bars in front of drunk people who didn't even care," he recalled. "I hated the barrier between audience and performer."

In 2009, a friend of his was working on a solar project for the Goldwell Open Air Museum in Rhyolite, Nev., and asked Colorusso to join him. Colorusso developed the sun boxes and brought them from his home in Hingham, Mass., to Nevada, where he completed a residency at the museum.

The sun boxes sang in this outdoor sculpture museum located in the desert on the border of Death Valley.

Since then, he's taken the sun boxes to various spots across the country -- Turner's Falls, Mass.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and most recently the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where the sun boxes will be part of a spring equinox event at the museum's outdoor exhibit space.

"We thought the outdoor program was a great reason to bring some weather-sensitive sound that Craig created," said Anne Laker, the museum's director of public programs. "We hope people in Indianapolis stop by and step into the installation to experience it."

In Indianapolis and wherever the sun boxes go, people are able to cross that barrier between the audience, the music and the environment. And Colorusso would have it no other way.

"If you were to walk in front of a box, your shadow would stop that box. It's interactive in a not so obvious way. Once you stop a box, you've altered the composition."

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