FORBIDDEN FRUIT FORBIDDEN FRUIT is a sound installation consisting of a group of 6 brightly colored portable stand-alone mp3 players that have had custom light systems affixed inside. The lights respond to the intensity of the sound emanating from the speakers and make the translucent mp3 players glow from their insides. The mp3 players choose from 99 tracks at random of a conglameration of sounds collected from the installation's immediate environment. To create the audio content for the mp3 players, custom software written in Max/MSP would loop recursively through a folder, picking random sound files. Upon selecting a file, a random start and stop point would be chosen. The information between these points would be written to the new file, and the patch would move on to the next file. The tracks generated by this process ranged in density from hundreds of files in one second to ten files in a minute. For our installation at Soundwalk, the 'pods' were hung in a medium sized tree in a very public area of sidewalk space.