There’s a permanent Sonos Studio in L.A., but the multimedia gallery and event space recently took a week-long trip to New York City. It runs through Sunday, Oct. 5 at NeueHouse near Madison Square Park, and the week-long event features a smorgasbord of daily concerts, art exhibits, and interactive workshops.

It's basically a futuristic day camp with a lot of weird, fun things going on. In addition to daily concerts, you've got workstations where you can make your own Sonos speakers, a theater where you can take in an A/V installation by artist JD Walsh and the band Spoon, and a moving mercurial sculpture collaboration by musician Dev Hynes and design shop The Principals.

One of the main attractions was this massive, interactive display made of 300 Sonos Play:1 speakers and four Sonos Sub woofers. Dubbed “Sounds of NYC,” this moving map of sound uses 180 Play:1 speakers filled with LED lights as a display. Those light-up speakers act purely as “pixels”—they don’t actually produce sound because they've been gutted. To handle the audio, there are 120 black Play:1 units on either side of the display.

Once you stand in front of the wall, it greets you with a giant “YO!” Then the display morphs into a map of the five boroughs. A Kinect controller above the speaker wall acts as an input device, and moving your hands around selects different parts of the city. White “pixels” display the selectable locations. Once they’re selected, they pop out of the wall thanks to Arduino controllers behind the scenes. A woman’s voice announces the location and artist, and the system plays a song that represents the area.

"All the songs are streamed from Google Play," explains Brad Wolf, senior director of brand innovation at Sonos. "The back-end program is built using Flash, which controls the movement and the light of the units while also grabbing the songs from Google Play."

The end result is a giant, interactive Lite Brite that plays music. The project started as a collaboration between California-based Sonos and Stockholm-based creative agency Perfect Fools, who worked on the piece's overall design. The hardware and mechanics were assembled by VolvoxLabs in Brooklyn. The location-based music playlist was curated by DJ/production team Wolf+Lamb, while a second playlist of ambient noises recorded at the actual locations in the map was created by the two-piece group Big Noble.

Somehow, the project came together in three months despite the teams being scattered across the globe.

"It was a transcontinental effort to collaborate on this project," says Wolf. "[We used] Skype for regular check-ins."

As a music map, NYC’s playlist is rock-solid and incredibly varied: Everyone from Louis Armstrong (Queens) to Nas (Brooklyn) to soundbites from the Metropolitan Opera House (Upper West Side, Manhattan) to Afrika Bambaataa (The Bronx) is in the mix. The maps were initially planned out using Google Maps, with one or multiple song suggestions for each location. To keep it fresh—and maybe avoid debates about the best artists in each borough—Perfect Fools says it mixes up the song list from day to day.

After Sonos Studio NYC wraps up, the “Sounds of NYC” hardware will live on. However, its light show and sounds will adapt to the next place it visits.

"The beauty of the installation is that it is a flexible canvas," says Sonos's Wolf. "It can musically bring any city or region to life—whether that's LA, London, New Orleans, or Beijing."