Databells in Montreal Turns Global Data Into Sound and Music

Rich Loen spent thirty years running InGenius, which builds software to make call centres run smoother for some of the world's largest companies. When he sold his company in 2019, he made a list of everything he'd ever wanted to build but hadn't afforded the time for. The question was where it could all be built.

He had been watching a vacant six-bay garage on Carling Avenue in Ottawa for years, driving past it on the way to his kid's hockey practice, thinking it looked like exactly the right kind of place. He took it over in 2019, spent two years building it out into a full machine shop with woodworking equipment, welding stations, and a row of 3D printers; this was the Loen.Design Studio, until in 2024 Rich opened the gallery space adjacent the studio, and called it, the Salon des Bananes. Then, out of that and the gallery, over the better part of four years, he built what would become Databells: a room of roughly 100 bells, each wired to its own circuit board, each striking to the rhythm of a real-world statistic.

It is, by any measure, an unlikely thing to exist. It is also, by most accounts, an unforgettable one.

"I look at it like the paint for this piece of art is the bells," he says. "They were a very, very powerful tool."

There’s making, there’s art, and then there’s making art

Loen takes the call from his studio on Carling Avenue, and there's a faint welder's tan across his face. He talks about how, growing up, art was a regularly low and persistent hum in his life; his mother painted in a studio set up in the family home. He started his first company in high school and kept starting them from there, running businesses his whole career. InGenius was the last of them, and when he and his wife sold it, what followed was, by his own description, approximately thirty minutes of retirement.

The transition from tech to art wasn't as clean as the timeline suggests. Loen came up through what he calls the maker community—people who build things because building things is satisfying—before he started grappling with what separates making from art. The founder of the Ottawa Art Gallery, Glenn McInnis, became a friend and mentor, and asked him the question every artist eventually has to answer: what does this mean? "It's often referred to as the most terrible, awful question," Loen says. "But it's valid."

"The superpower that I have is my career in tech," he says. "It's like a carpenter would bring a hammer in and build a house—it's just a tool, but it's a tool I have access to." The tool, in this case, is the ability to wire a room full of objects to a live database and make them sing. He thinks of the bells the way a painter thinks of pigments. "I look at it like the paint for this piece of art is the bells," he says. "They were a very, very powerful tool."

Databells took four years to build and runs about 40 by 40 feet. Visitors enter through a freestanding door. Press the doorbell mounted beside it and the performance begins. The bells start slowly, one or two at a time, then build.

Each of the roughly 100 bells has a small computer underneath it, connected to a server managing a database of hundreds of statistics: Stars being born, vaccines administered, cigarette-related deaths, packages delivered, or the number of people currently farting in any given room of a hundred. Each bell is assigned a statistic when the performance begins, and that assignment reshuffles every time.

"Every time we start it, it's different," Loen says. "Everybody who goes, every time we start it, it's a different song."

No two performances are ever the same

The first version had the bells ringing at random, and Loen describes standing in the room when they turned it on for the first time. "It was kickass," he says. The solution came from simulating the bells in GarageBand, dropping audio clips of each one into the software and watching them snap to a beat. They rewrote the software so the bells would ring true to their data but always on a beat. "You start to feel it," he says, "and I would look around and people would be bopping their head or tapping their foot—little kids would be dancing. We were all dancing to the same song."

But the song is never the same twice. Every time the installation starts, statistics are reshuffled across bells, meaning the composition you hear on a Tuesday afternoon has never existed before and never will again. "Every time we start it, it's different," Loen says. "Everybody who goes, every time we start it, it's a different song."

The bells themselves took years to collect. Loen put the word out to anyone who might cross paths with something interesting—friends came back from Norway and Asia with contributions, while others—like one schoolhouse bell that was sitting in a demolition pile about to be sold for scrap—had to be scavenged and haggled for.

What Loen couldn't have engineered in advance was what the room does to people. Visitors at the Ottawa run have come back a second time, then a third, dragging co-workers and family members with them. A Statistics Canada employee walked in, found a bell ringing for canola harvest data she had personally compiled, and ended up in the agency's internal newsletter.

Some reactions run deeper. "I've gone over to people," Loen says, "and they have tears streaming down their face."

The engineering, Loen says, is what makes all of it possible—every bell modular, every table C-shaped and interlocking, the whole installation designed from the start to pack up and move. Sonically or physically, Databells was always meant to travel.

Its first stop outside Ottawa is the corridor of Saint-Paul in Old Montreal, where it runs through August 16. Some people will spend twenty minutes reading every placard. Some will just stand there, tapping a foot to a beat they can't quite explain, listening to a song that exists only once.

There's something worth sitting with in all of this: Loen spent decades building software to last, but Databells is the opposite of that. It has no function beyond the moment you're standing in it, and every performance dissolves the second it's done. For a man who made a career out of building things that endure, there's something deliberate about choosing, at this stage, to build an experience that will disappear once had.