Hasta La Ideas

As a needle passes over this vinyl globe by Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki, it plays folk music and national anthems from around the world (+ movie).

When the needle moves along its metal arc it plays sounds from the grooves cut into the sphere, much like a traditional vinyl record player. Suzuki has been working on The Sound of the Earth since 2009 and has now unveiled a prototype, although the design doesn’t work perfectly yet – as the movie above shows, the music skips as the globe turns.

“Initially this project idea came from [a desire] to store data in physical media,” he told Dezeen. ”I have travelled to many countries and each country has a field recording, so you can experience a 30 minute soundscape from top to end.” The sounds include pop music, national anthems, traditional folk music and spoken word recordings.

The globe is the latest of Suzuki’s creations involving sound, which also include a set of pens that record sound as a line on paper and a stylus and speaker that run along a vinyl track. More recently we featured his radio made from a circuit board based on the London Tube map. Suzuki has been nominated for the PAD Prize for young designers this year.

This isn’t the first music player shaped like a globe to appear on Dezeen – we also featured a round CD player mounted on a tilted axis.

Photographs are by Hitomi Kai Yoda.
The movie is by Alice Masters and Pierrick Mouton.
Concept collaborator: Yoshihiro Katsumata
Development and engineering: Kimura (Tasco Inc), Akichika Tanaka
Sound programming: Bengt Sjolen

See all stories about Yuri Suzuki »
See all stories about music »

The post The Sound of the Earth
by Yuri Suzuki appeared first on Dezeen.