The digital revolution is still running full-force, but a London-based designer has altered the perceptions of physical media by developing a globe-shaped piece of vinyl.
Called The Sound of the Earth, the audio sculpture by Yuri Suzuki is composed of a black globe clamped down in a metal vice, with a stylus that runs longitudinally onto grooves that plays a mash-up of field recordings the artist had collected on his own global travels over the past four years. Each country the needle traverses plays a different sound, with sources including traditional folk tunes, national anthems and regional pop music.
An interview with the Guardian had the artist explain his piece, which demonstrates his preference for records over a stacked iPhone.
"I wanted to make a point about music being something physical," Suzuki said before joking of his disdain for digital music collections. "A few years ago my hard drive crashed and I lost my entire 500Gb music collection. From then on, music held in physical objects seemed safer."
As for the audio held on the sculpture, he explained, "I'm always travelling. I take a dictaphone wherever I go, and this project was a way of bringing all these sounds together."
Suzuki had been working on his latest project for three years and developed software that allowed him to map all the sounds onto a 3D surface, with the sculpture's spherical track cutting machine designed with the help of engineers in Tokyo.
Other projects that Suzuki has prepped in the past include dancing robots and "a room-sized contraption that put together a cooked breakfast from scratch."
You can sample The Sound of the Earth in the video down below.
Called The Sound of the Earth, the audio sculpture by Yuri Suzuki is composed of a black globe clamped down in a metal vice, with a stylus that runs longitudinally onto grooves that plays a mash-up of field recordings the artist had collected on his own global travels over the past four years. Each country the needle traverses plays a different sound, with sources including traditional folk tunes, national anthems and regional pop music.
An interview with the Guardian had the artist explain his piece, which demonstrates his preference for records over a stacked iPhone.
"I wanted to make a point about music being something physical," Suzuki said before joking of his disdain for digital music collections. "A few years ago my hard drive crashed and I lost my entire 500Gb music collection. From then on, music held in physical objects seemed safer."
As for the audio held on the sculpture, he explained, "I'm always travelling. I take a dictaphone wherever I go, and this project was a way of bringing all these sounds together."
Suzuki had been working on his latest project for three years and developed software that allowed him to map all the sounds onto a 3D surface, with the sculpture's spherical track cutting machine designed with the help of engineers in Tokyo.
Other projects that Suzuki has prepped in the past include dancing robots and "a room-sized contraption that put together a cooked breakfast from scratch."
You can sample The Sound of the Earth in the video down below.
