Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival 2013: sound machines that transform and distort visitors’ voices feature in this interactive installation by Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki (+ slideshow + movie).

The Garden of Russolo at the Victoria and Albert museum comprises voice-activated devices that Yuri Suzuki calls White Noise Machines. Each processor is housed in a wooden box on four legs and has a horn on one side that receives sounds made by visitors and emits the transformed noises.

“If you speak or scream into one of the boxes, it captures your voice and translates it into various effects,” Suzuki told Dezeen.

Each box is fitted with a Raspberry Pi computer to process the sounds it receives and each machine is programmed to create a different effect.

One machine plays sounds back in reverse, another creates musical notes and another can speed up or slow down sounds when a handle on the side is turned.

Suzuki told Dezeen that he created the machines to allow people to appreciate the sounds that they can make. “You never realise or feel the sounds that you are creating and the sounds that you do create disappear almost immediately,” said Suzuki.

“I wanted to create a way for people to capture sound and a moment for them to realise how interesting it is,” he added.

Suzuki originally designed the White Noise Machines for the Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi, India, in 2009 where he was a resident artist.

The Garden of Russolo was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum last week as part of the London Design Festival. “A museum gallery is a great location to present this idea as most museums tend to be quiet and people care more about the noise they create,” said Suzuki.

Here’s a film of visitors interacting with the machines in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sackler Centre foyer:

Here’s another film of the sound machines in the V&A’s John Madejski Garden:

Suzuki told Dezeen that he named the installation after Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo. “He treated noise as music and created machines purely to create big noises,” Suzuki said.

We’ve featured a number of Suzuki’s other designs on Dezeen, including robots that travel along lines and turn coloured scribbles into music, a radio with a circuit board arranged like the London Tube map and a set of pens that record and play back sounds.

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Photography and films are by Yuri Suzuki.

Here’s more information from the curator:

White Noise Machine

Yuri Suzuki is an artist who explores the territory of sound and design by developing devices under the theme of sound-technology and music-human relationships. In our daily lives, we are unconsciously surrounded by environmental sound, but sound influences people’s minds to a great extent. Suzuki produced numerous works focusing on this “noise”.

One representative work is sound-taxi: a London black cab outfitted with a sound collector microphone and many speakers records the surrounding noise, converts it into music, and outputs it real time.

Additionally, he produced Child Chiller, which uses the visible effect of “white noise” to erase noise with some other noise. This uses the noise that resembles the sound in Mother’s womb and is said to relax and stop babies from crying.

Similarly, this time, V&A introduces the new work, “White Noise Machine”, that asks about “the sound-human relationship” using this “white noise”.

It is based on “silent city” project during his residence at Khoj Artist Association in New Delhi in 2010 to erase the town’s noise. He says New Delhi is the noisiest city that he ever visited and could not stand the noise, which normally he comfortably enjoys. So he used the noise erasing effect for TV static called white noise and made a device that produces the same amount of noise in order to make the noisy city silent.

Throughout his works, Suzuki’s problem consciousness always stays at “sound” and “physical law”. He conveys invisible “sound” and “mechanism of things moving” to viewers as a fun experience. Substance itself is at the same time an object that explains it. His concept is simple, clear and design is pop, that’s what makes it good. It is rare to find a designer who is so good at making an entrance to products’ humorous part. It is strange that while looking at his works the machines become loveable and almost human-like.

Supported by ICN Gallery and The Japan Foundation.

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by Yuri Suzuki appeared first on Dezeen.

Competition: Dezeen is giving readers the chance to win one of two books from a limited edition containing visualisations of sound projects by Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki.

BOOM, an acronym for B-side Of Onomatopoeic Music, contains photos, graphics and illustrations that depict artist, designer and musician Yuri Suzuki‘s sound installations as images.

The book was edited by London design studio Åbäke with contributions from designer Simone Grant and illustrator Tim Hunkin, plus musicians DMX Krew, Momus and Maywa Denki.

The book took two years to complete and was launched last weekend as a limited edition, which can be purchased on the websites of publishers Dente-De-Leone and Clear Edition.

Suzuki’s sonic works include a radio made from a circuit board that looks like the London tube map and a vinyl globe that plays folk music and national anthems as a needle passes over it.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “BOOM” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 26 February 2013. Two winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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by Yuri Suzuki to be won appeared first on Dezeen.

Coup de cœur pour cet artiste Yuri Suzuki qui explore différents domaines dont la musique et les objets designs. Voici son dernier projet commisionné par Musarc où il utilise 16 segments de feu pour visualiser l’ensemble. Une installation sonore à découvrir en vidéo HD dans la suite.

Le designer japonais Yuri Suzuki a récemment présenté son projet « London Underground Circuit Maps » développé dans le cadre de Designers in Residence au London Design Museum jusqu’en janvier 2013. Son travail explore les systèmes de communication souterrains à travers l’utilisation de circuits électroniques.

Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki has made a radio from an electronic circuit board that’s arranged to look like the London tube map.

The map is inspired by a spoof diagram created by the original designer of the London Tube map, Harry Beck, which shows the lines and stations as an annotated electrical circuit. Iconic landmarks on Suzuki’s map are represented by components relating to their functions, including a speaker where Speaker’s Corner sits and a battery representing Battersea Power Station.

Suzuki told Dezeen he wanted to make the components visible because “it is difficult for consumers to understand the complexity of the workings behind the exterior” of today’s electronic devices. By creating a “narrative to explain how electronics work,” he hopes users will be encouraged to fix their own broken devices.

Tube Map Radio is one of two projects completed by Suzuki in response to a brief of Thrift set for Designers in Residence, an annual platform for upcoming designers at the Design Museum in London. Suzuki previously worked with Oscar Diaz to design a pen that records and plays back the sound it makes as it draws a line and, for his graduation project from the Royal College of Art in 2008, he presented products that investigated the physical properties of sound.

Photography is by Hitomi Kai Yoda.

Here’s some more information from Suzuki:

This year, the Designers in Residence project theme is Thrift and in response to this brief I have made projects which re-design the communication system of electronics.

I have investigated the workings of consumer electronics. Appliances such as transistor radios and toasters used to be easy for the user to take apart and repair. Today, products such as iPods have sleek, impenetrable skins and nanocomponents too small for the human hand to fix. It is difficult for consumers to understand the complexity of the workings behind the exterior.

In response to this, I have explored the use of printed circuit board (PCB), the simple and efficient components found inside the majority of electronic devices today. First project is tube map radio inspired by Harry Beck’s 1933 spoof diagram of his original design for the London Underground map drawn as an electrical circuit.

The PCB circuit pattern is extremely complicated and difficult to find out how electricity connect between components. In tube map radio I positioned electronic components based on the function of London city, for example speaker volume for speaker corner, power battery for Battersea powerstation and so on. Then you will realize how electricity is less complicated than you imagine, and if you replace it with something you are familiar with it will be simpler to understand.

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