On the SoHo corner where Prince and Elizabeth Streets meet, dog walkers, errand runners and lunch breakers squinted through the April sun at the part man, part beat-emanating automaton approaching them.
Ari Miller, 25, known by his artist name AriAtHome, is a New York-based wayfaring musician who turns heads with his mobile beat-making rig. Donning a get-up that looks like a cross between a Ghostbusters proton pack and a ballpark-vendor tray, he dishes out on-the-spot hip-hop, neo-soul, funk and house beats throughout the city’s streets, all created entirely from scratch without breaking stride.
“I built the rig with New York City in mind,” Miller said. “When you make a good song with a stranger in the street it’s like, ‘Whoa, did we just become best friends?’”
Crammed with keyboards, a looper, six speakers and a controller with dozens of knobs and faders, Miller’s Frankenstein instrument offers a buffet of drum, keyboard and bass sounds, interfaced through the music software Ableton. In the back, a mess of cables hides a Mac Mini M4, a modem and the hot-swappable camera batteries that power it all.
Perhaps the most important part of the gear is tucked into the ensemble’s chest strap: a microphone, ready for any brave improviser to hop on and freestyle or sing over Miller’s beats.
“It’s important to me that it’s not a talent show that I’m running,” Miller said. “The main goal is working with legit strangers and forging connections with them not just through music, but by helping underscore their own self-expression.”
Miller was a bedroom beatmaker when he moved to New York City in 2020, but a desire to engage with the city, invigorated by Covid-era cabin fever, spawned his current project. “I’m in such an incredible city, but I’m hiding out in my room for some reason,” he recalled in a video interview. (His artist name nods to this time.) At his light-filled Brooklyn apartment before a Thursday excursion, Miller wrestled on his 55-pound setup — designed and welded with the help of a friend in Denver — with a practiced multi-limb choreography.
Miller’s first outdoor livestreams were in 2023, when he used a pole-mounted camera to document his musical meanderings. He wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. Zach Sabri, a British D.J. known as Suat who wears a mobile rig for sets from both everyday and extreme locations, was an early inspiration. “The interactions and the kind of quick wit of it is all completely unscripted,” Sabri said in a video interview. “We just want pure organic reactions.”
Miller ditched the pole-cam and enlisted the help of a friend, the videographer Dylan Goucher, in September 2024. Around this time, he fully committed to the project, cross-posting highlights from the stream to Instagram and TikTok, growing his 7,000 followers on Instagram to over one million, and reaching beyond the niche music community on Twitch. He soon went viral with segments of his spontaneous collaborations with freestylers.
Miller’s musical life began early near Albany, N.Y., where he grew up in an artistic home (both his father and brother are orchestral conductors). “We had a piano in our living room, and my brother would always play skilled renditions of classical pieces,” Miller said. “When it was my turn, I enjoyed just messing around and trying to find chords and figure out scales.”
He taught himself music production, amassing a collection of electronic music gear, but Covid thwarted his ambitions for playing live shows. To scratch that performance itch, Miller turned to livestreaming from his apartment on Twitch in 2021. He attended Twitch conventions, where he was introduced to IRL (in real life) streamers such as Yuggie_TV, JinnyTTY and JayStreazy.
Those kinds of content creators “will go to new countries or new places. They are usually alone with a camera or a phone or a backpack, and they just create experiences for themselves,” Miller explained. “They enrich themselves, and that’s what their content is. I remember being so impressed by that.”
With persistence, Miller’s experiment became a full-time gig. Even with overhead expenses like paying Goucher, the data cost of streaming, and repairing and upgrading his instrument, he earns a living via online audience donations and brand sponsorships.
Arriving in SoHo, Miller wafted out some warm synth chords and started walking, head-bopping along to the evolving beat. Soon he had a collaborator: Kossivi Alokpovi, who was on lunch break from a nearby restaurant and was drawn into Miller’s hefty backbeat and samples of his own voice. Next up was Hannah Tangen, a vocalist enjoying her day off from her job as a singing waitress. She delivered soaring backing vocals as Miller took a freestyle verse.
“He has such a good attitude about it, he doesn’t make you feel nervous,” Tangen said.
A small crowd of passers-by paused to watch, while another audience was enjoying the impromptu show online. Roughly 6,500 viewers across Twitch and YouTube tuned in live, unleashing a slipstream of fire emojis in the chat. Miller has thought deeply about the culture of livestreaming: For his college senior thesis in comparative literature, he wrote about the livestream chat as a modern metaphysical audience in music performance providing on-the-spot feedback.
In the shadow of the trees at Lt. Petrosino Park, Gannon Green, a junior at N.Y.U., swooped in majestically on a longboard to take a turn on the mic. He and Miller shifted into a balladeering rock number, and before long, Cedric Small, fresh out of class from Brooklyn College, joined in. The trio steered into a bass-heavy hip-hop beat, with Small letting fly a torrent of imaginative rhymes and Green offering lofty vocal interludes. (“Not overthinking it helps a freestyle flow a lot better,” Small noted.) At the end, Instagram handles were shared, daps were exchanged, and Small and Green, who had arrived as strangers, left as musical collaborators.
“That is New York. That is the passion of the city and I’m really trying to join in,” Green said. These evanescent moments are what makes perspiring through the streets of New York worth it for Miller.
“Freestyling is freeing,” said Anastasia Caulfield, one of Miller’s fan favorite collaborators, in a video interview. “Ari is out there by himself inviting the community into his world not with ego, but with a really light heart.” Whether the off-the-cuff improvisations are gritty, deep, X-rated or just plain silly, their power lies in their radical vulnerability. “It’s like talking into a massive megaphone, you’re showing them you,” Miller said.
The Thursday session lasted four hours, until Miller’s physical and social battery — as well as the juice in his gear — began to fade. He and Goucher hopped into an Uber, heading home to cut up the stream video into short-form content for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
With Miller and his mobile music studio packed up and gone, ambulance sirens and the sound of sangria glasses clinking retook the sonic landscape of SoHo. But online, listeners were free to revisit the sidewalk cyphers that were — literally and in the best possible way — pedestrian.
