by Vanessa Pessato

Pulse asks a simple but urgent question: if music creates measurable value in public space, why is its economic model still so precarious?

The project envisions a sustainable urban infrastructure in which kinetic pavement tiles — triangular modules embedded with piezoelectric sensors — are installed in high-footfall cultural hubs such as Covent Garden. As audiences gather, move, and groove around a street performer, their collective motion is harvested as clean energy and fed into the city's grid, conducted by the local council.

This sets a circular economy of energy in motion: the council stores what the crowd generates and plays it back in two ways. A portion re-enters the city as real electricity, powering the public infrastructure that keeps live music alive on the streets; the remainder becomes a direct payout to the artist — part digital currency, part real money — tuned proportionally to the energy their performance attracted.

The bigger the crowd, the louder the song, the greater the reward. Every footstep is a note. Every gathered audience, a composition.

Pulse reimagines the city as a living instrument — one that amplifies the musicians it hosts, sustains itself through the energy of its own culture, and plays back value to those who give it rhythm.