When Allard van Hoorn saw an international request for a public art project in Pittsburgh several years ago, he went online to search for images of a city he knew little about.

He clicked on a satellite view and found the specific site for the project — Market Square.

“It looked like a giant record player,” the 48-year-old Dutch artist told a gathering at a Tuesday news conference Downtown. “That’s how I got the idea.”

His resulting interactive sound creation, Mix-n-Match, will be turned on at 5:30 p.m. Friday as one of several events scheduled to commemorate Pittsburgh’s bicentennial.

Other events scheduled to celebrate the city’s bicentennial are:

• A pregame pre-Incorporation Day puck drop at 7 p.m. today to start the Penguins game against the Carolina Hurricanes at Consol Energy Center. Mayor Bill Peduto will be joined by Penguins alumni Ken Schinkel and Duane Rupp.

• Mr. Peduto and Bicentennial Commission chairman Andy Masich will lead a celebration from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday at the City-County Building, starting with the unveiling of the original incorporation charter, with live music and guest speakers.

• Visitors will be able to register for guided tours of the historical areas of the 99-year-old City-County building from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. The City-County Building exhibit will run through April 8.

The events will continue into Friday evening with a Bicentennial Gallery Crawl from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. It will include stops at the lobby of the City-County Building, Market Square, the Omni William Penn and other locations.

Mr. Van Hoorn’s exhibit features a giant stylus, like that on a turntable, in the middle of the square.

He collaborated with eight cultural organizations, recording their sounds, from tap dancing to steel drumming to pushing brooms. He manipulated the sounds into eight musical tracks that the public will be able to play.

His proposal was chosen from among those of 80 artists who responded to the call for the next in a series of temporary installations in Market Square. The Market Square Public Art Program was initiated three years ago to activate the square during its slow time, late winter, to help merchants and “to make it a year-round destination,” said Jeremy Waldrup, CEO and president of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership.

Mr. Van Hoorn’s Mix-n-Match is an urban paean to the aboriginal idea of “songlines” -- music that is carved by geography, mythology and culture.

He said urban songlines incorporate architecture and other aspects of the built environment into the mix. The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership’s Clean Team created the sounds for the song “1099 on Fifth and Wood,” 1099 having been code for an emergency he heard reported on their walkie-talkies. Poetry read by students at Pittsburgh-CAPA inspired another track.

The collaborating groups also include Point Park University, Project Silk, the First Lutheran Church, Urban Pathways Charter School and the Carnegie Library-Hazelwood.

For details about the Gallery Crawl, visit http://crawl.trustarts.org/.

Historic documents on Pittsburgh’s incorporation and early ordinances can be found on the Historic Pittsburgh website: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/pittsburgh/.

Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.

First Published: March 16, 2016, 3:42 p.m.