IBM

Case Study

Challenge

For the 2014 US Open, IBM and its partners set out to transform live tennis data into an experience audiences could see and hear. Working with James Murphy and his team, match events and statistics were translated into musical characteristics including pitch and tempo, creating a unique real-time soundtrack for each match. Across 187 matches and more than 400 hours of tennis, the digital experience needed to ingest live court-side data, generate and distribute audio, synchronize an interactive visualization and score experience, and remain reliable throughout one of the world’s highest-profile sporting events.

Approach

I served as a central delivery and technology leader for the engagement, owning technical delivery alongside production and working directly with stakeholders across IBM, Ogilvy, Tool, the USTA/US Open, and James Murphy’s team. I led developers, technical leads, and DevOps/infrastructure resources while coordinating architecture, staffing, schedules, risk, deployment planning, launch readiness, and troubleshooting. Code-level implementation decisions remained collaborative with the lead developer, while I maintained responsibility for ensuring the broader technology and delivery strategy could support the live experience.

The result was a responsive HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 experience that fused court-side telemetry with generative audio and a WebGL-powered visualizer. Each match composition was created live, archived in a gallery, and distributed through SoundCloud, giving audiences a new way to experience the relationship between the action on court and the data IBM captured around it.

Global Delivery & Live Operations

A major part of my responsibility was designing an operational model capable of supporting the experience continuously throughout the tournament. I created the orchestration and installation manifests used to build and deploy three distinct cloud environments, with each deployment comprising more than 60 servers configured for specialized responsibilities including web serving, load balancing, application processing, data parsing, caching, media processing, and data persistence.

Leading up to the event, I worked directly with IBM’s cloud team through repeated deployment rehearsals, validating the same manifests and operating procedures we would rely on in production. During the tournament, those procedures allowed individual cloud environments to be taken down for updates, redeployed, reviewed with IBM, and returned to production readiness while the broader experience remained operational.

Live-event delivery also meant there was no conventional end-of-day handoff. I served as a primary escalation point throughout the engagement and remained available around the clock—including overnight and early-morning support—to coordinate troubleshooting, infrastructure changes, deployment decisions, and stakeholder communication when issues emerged. The technical environment incorporated CentOS, Ubuntu, Nginx, Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, ImageMagick, Lua, Express, Forever, Python, and supporting packages, but the larger challenge was orchestrating those systems, teams, and partners as one dependable live service.

Impact

US Open Sessions transformed more than 400 hours of live tennis into a digital music and data experience spanning 187 matches. The platform connected IBM’s real-time match data with generative sound, interactive visualization, live scoring, and music distribution, demonstrating how complex data could become an accessible and engaging consumer experience during a global sporting event.

Recognition

• The One Show Silver Pencil — Sound Design
• The One Show Bronze Pencil — Animation / Motion Graphics
• The One Show — Additional Merit Recognition
• D&AD — Graphite Pencil Recognition

The recognition reflected more than the novelty of translating tennis data into music. US Open Sessions brought together real-time data, technology, music, interaction design, motion, and live-event delivery as a single consumer experience. The One Show archive also credits me among the contributors to the recognized work, connecting my role in delivery and technical leadership directly to the award-winning project.