Instrument Translates The Sound Of Objects


It looks like the kind of spit you’d roast a pig on for some sort of tropical luau cookout. Except instead of flames, there is a supersensitive laser rangefinder. And rather than a suckling pig sizzling, there is a clown head seemingly singing. Or a roll of paper towels.

Really, just about any earthly object you can think of is mountable to Dennis Paul’s Instrument for the Sonification of Everyday Things.

The project is quite literal to its name. Paul is able to translate — decode? produce? — the particular melody of a material object. It started as a challenge to reconsider the objects around us in a different way.

This motor can be programmed to spin at exact speeds, like 30 RPM (rounds per minute) which naturally maps to 120 BPM (beats per minute), and it’s this precision that gives what could be a one-off art project functional legs as a viable musical machine.

“Sometimes it sounds as if it is trying to speak in a weird ‘new aesthetic’ way,” Paul told FastCoDesign. [FastCoDesign, Dennis Paul]