Public Resonance, Samuel Weller
For London Design Festival Yamaha Design Studio teamed up with Design Products students from the RCA to produce Resonance. This exhibition showcases their joint developments in enabling ‘greater intimacy’ between the performer and their audience.
Resonance is a taster of ‘how musical instruments and live performance will look and feel in the future.’ On display throughout the store, this exhibition relied on interaction, giving a different and unique experience.
Public Resonance is a project by Samuel Weller, who has taken a very literal approach, to allow a performer to actually ‘resonate’ with their audience. Samuel has taken street furniture and exploited their various vibrations with a ‘portable percussive tool kit.’ The idea continues with architecture and public transport, allowing artists and audiences to collide wherever, whenever.
What inspired Samuel? The busking community and the fun spontaneity of street performers.
Human Speaker, Nic Wallenberg
The Human Speaker is another very literal interpretation by designer Nic Wallenberg. Nic’s device is a collar which when worn turns the person’s mouth into a speaker. Playing on the vibrations from your throat, you can control your music with your mouth and lips. With each collar producing two musical notes, when multiple people wear the collars, group interaction is encouraged to produce a more diverse composition.
Touch the Sound, Lingjing Yin
What if our body became the acoustic container of our memory? One of the many questions that inspired Lingjing Yin’s project, Touch the Sound, which ‘explores how the human body can be used as a mediator between sound touch and emotion.’ Lingjing’s development of stylish hardware and software allows the changes in a person’s electrical charge to be recognised, thus producing musical notes. Touch the Sound has even been taken a step further, now developed for the use of autistic people.
