SOUND IN THE MACHINE: SOUNDS.BUTTER

Sound in the Machine

SOUNDS.BUTTER

Digging the work of the pair of gentlemen making up the SOUNDS.BUTTER interactive design group. Though chock-full of interesting visual/3-D designs and concepts, as you might imagine, I’m especially interested in their manipulation of everyday objects to produce sound, rendering possibilities for new ways to experience sound. Here's what they've got so far.

Tape Converter is an auditory interpretation of the residue of transparent sticky tape via web cam underneath the tape dispenser. The web cam signal is run though a sound generator and output as audio. In a way, not so different from the record, magnetic tape, and CDs--data is stored on the medium, interpreted by the machine (with varying degrees of 'autonomy') and delivered as sound. I haven't found anything on what informs the sound generator, but I do like the fact that, at least in the video demonstration on the site, the designers didn't choose typical sounds to output.

The Flower Pot and Wall Piano take similar approaches but use a more recognizable (and oftentimes gloriously out-of-place) sound. Flower Pot is passively interactive, picking up information from surface vibrations and outputting that as sound. The Wall Piano requires the user to actively manipulate it and sounds like, what, a piano. But neither produce sounds that one would expect--the Wall Piano doesn't look like any piano I've ever seen and the Flower Pot doesn't fall into nature or bug sounds or whatever you'd expect (if you ever expected a flower to make sounds).

Or take “Visible Sound,” the prototype of a sewing machine with attached car CD player face that would stitch the familiar graphical representation of waves (sound) onto some material. This serves the anecdotal purpose of ‘visualizing’ sound, but more importantly, delivers it back to us in a modality we hardly ever associate sound with: touch. Although sound is by definition mechanical energy, thus, touch, this prototype gives a more direct impression of that reality.

Two otherwise lackluster accessories of life show up modified for new and improved functionality. The Ultrasonic Umbrella prototype uses ultrasonic sound to dry the umbrella. Clever as that is, my favorite is the mobility series consisting of 4 canes retrofitted with various noise-making devices.