A (For 100 Cars)

The piece is part of Ikeda's series of installations exploring the musical note A and was written for an "orchestra" of 100 cars, which produce sound using sine wave synthesisers created by Tatsuya Takahashi and Masimillian Rest.

[4] Ikeda composed a new version of the project, A [For 100 Cars], as part of the first Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) festival to be held in Los Angeles.

[5][6] The use of cars in the composition was conceptualised six months prior to its performance[7] during a drinking conversation between Ikeda and the co-founder of the RBMA, Torsten Schmidt.

[8] Takahashi partnered with Masimillian Rest of E-RM Erfindungsbüro, a Berlin-based musical instrument maker, to create the synthesisers over a period of around three months.

Of course they are not trained as musicians, but I want to engage with the local people to make it happen.As part of the project's creation, a short film titled LA: Cars + Music was made by Van Alpert and Estevan Oriol, a Los Angeles-based photographer, in collaboration with the Red Bull Music Academy.

[2][10]: 179 [12] Each car had a sine wave synthesiser created for the event connected to its sound system, which constantly output a drone at a frequency that has been associated with concert pitch A at some point in history.

[19] The sine waves interfered with each other, creating beat patterns that changed depending on the listener's positioning relative to each sound system.

Their design was created from a piece of aluminium, inspired by the Monoliths of Arthur C. Clark's Space Odyssey series[18] and likened to the work of Dieter Rams.

[8] As the composition was loud (reaching almost 160 dB),[2] a safety test (using Max, a visual programming language, to create the sine waves) was completed in Cologne before the performance in Los Angeles.

[14] In the Los Angeles Times, Randall Roberts commented on the community aspect of the performance and how it "felt like a feat not only of bringing imagination to life".

[7] Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times that A [For 100 Cars] "turned negative space in the centre of downtown Los Angeles into a sublime womb [and] felt like a meditation".

[16] Mixmag put the event on their list of the best performances of the festival, and praised the "depth of thinking and originality behind the piece [which] made it a breathtaking experience for those in attendance".