Spicy Sofi plays Ableton Live from a Boeing 737 cockpit panel
The Paris producer’s SOFI AIRLINES show runs on aircraft hardware, custom Python code and a visual artist in Tunis who plays the 3D picture live.
A full-size Boeing 737 overhead panel, the section above the pilots’ heads that runs fuel, lights, anti-ice and electrics, now launches tracks in Ableton Live. Paris producer Spicy Sofi built the rig for SOFI AIRLINES, an audiovisual show he walked through in Magnetic Magazine’s How It Was Made series.
Sofi, who has roots in Tunis and Paris and co-founded the collective Morninglory, trained as a telecom engineer and later worked as a complex systems architect. He treated the cockpit as a systems problem first and a music project second. The set moves through progressive house, electro, acid and breakbeat, and it is arranged as a flight: boarding, taxi and takeoff, cruise, turbulence, descent and landing. A full show runs 45 minutes to an hour.
The hardware
The overhead came first. Sofi replaced its original interface electronics with four Arduino Mega boards running MobiFlight, the open-source cockpit firmware, and kept every switch, light and display in its original place. Then he reverse-engineered the messages the hardware sends and wrote his own Python bridge to Ableton Live. About six months of experiments later, the panel was part of the set.
The switches now launch and mute tracks, arm effects and fire scenes. The link runs both ways over MIDI and OSC, so when a warning stem fires, the matching annunciator lights up. A small web-based mapping tool lets him reassign any control in seconds before a gig.
The two thrust levers work as long-throw faders mapped to synth parameters such as filter cutoff, resonance, drive and oscillator detune. An Airbus sidestick handles rhythm: its buttons launch and swap drum and robotic synth loops, and the stick sweeps filters and effects on two axes. Both are Thrustmaster TCA Airbus flight-sim units, chosen because they are light and compact enough to tour with. Sofi says he wants to swap them for salvaged aircraft parts and is talking to people in aviation about decommissioned equipment that would otherwise be scrapped.
The radio panel is 3D printed in three modules (VHF COMM, NAV and transponder), modeled on Boeing units and slightly simplified. Its 8 encoders and 14 switches drive three Ableton Audio Effect Racks: a band-limited, crushed VHF Comms for vocals and stabs, NAV Space for the long reverbs and delays of the cruise section, and ATC Glitch for stutter, repeat and bit reduction in transitions.
The one modern controller is a Melbourne Instruments Roto-Control. Its motorized knobs move to the current values when he switches track or device, so nothing jumps.
Sound engine and software
Everything is played live in Ableton Live 12 from four instruments. Three come from The Usual Suspects, an open-source project that emulates the DSP chips of classic digital synths and loads their original firmware: JE-8086 running the Roland JP-8000 ROM, Osirus running the Access Virus B ROM, and Xenia, covering the Waldorf Microwave II / XT. The fourth is Arturia Pigments. A catalogue maps the key parameters of every patch to the same throttle and sidestick controls.
The code is modular. Each panel is its own module, and one orchestrator reads every interface card, translates input into MIDI and OSC for Ableton, and sends Ableton’s state back through AbletonOSC to the lights, displays and gauges. Behavior sits in config files, so changing the show means editing a file rather than rewiring. Sofi treats USB HID, MIDI, OSC and WebSocket like network links: message rates are controlled, devices reconnect on their own, and state resyncs when a panel returns.
Control and audio are separate. The cockpit is all USB with no audio. Sound leaves a MacBook (M4 Pro) through an Apollo Twin X as one stereo pair, so if a panel drops out the music keeps playing.
Visuals from Tunis
The visual artist is not in the room. Haïfa Becheikh, founder of the Tunis studio FMRXR, plays the visuals live from Tunis. A Node.js bridge on Sofi’s side converts Ableton’s OSC messages into a WebSocket stream, and that stream leaves Paris as structured data about the performance: tempo, scene launches, lever positions, cabin announcements.
The data drives SPICY AIRPORT, a real-time 3D world that runs in a web browser. It contains the SOFI AIRLINES aircraft with a flight model, an airport, a cabin turned into a club, and Paris rebuilt from OpenStreetMap. Sofi’s sidestick banks and rolls the plane on screen. Ableton scene names trigger camera moves: a DROP pushes the lens in, a BREAK pulls focus out, a BUILD UP tightens the frame.
Becheikh runs a browser VJ console called FMRXR TOWER. She picks shots, flies the drone, calls the weather and sends cues to Sofi’s booth, with every gesture quantizable to his next beat, bar or eight bars. Each camera is rendered in Full HD into TouchDesigner, where she layers them with generative GLSL effects in FMRXR TDMixer. A twin of her mixer runs in Paris next to the projector, kept in sync by FMRXR BordersSync, a plugin she built. BordersSync is due soon on Patreon for the TouchDesigner community.
No video crosses the Mediterranean. The show travels as about 25 small signed messages a second, and each city renders its own picture. Her moves are scheduled on Sofi’s bars rather than fired whenever a packet arrives. “Sofi sends data, I send a world back,” Becheikh says. “We decided early that no video would cross the sea.”
On the booth, a partner LED display called the Flight Wall shows real flights passing overhead, with callsign, route and airports. Sofi plays facing the crowd like a DJ and the cockpit like a pilot, and a large touring mirror lets the audience see his face and the panels together.
Next is what Sofi calls Jam Mode, where real flight data plays the music with him. The JAM radar already plots traffic around the venue. The plan is to turn it into musical input, so a flight entering the airspace could open a filter, and its altitude or speed could shape a sound.
