How to make music from anything

Designer, engineer and musician Yuri Suzuki is the poster-guy for the idea that science can be fun. Forget beakers and goggles, his inventions include a Three Thermin Radio, a light powered by a lemon and the Colour Chaser, “a miniature vehicle that detects and follows a black line whilst it reads crossing coloured lines and translates this RGB data into sound.” He displayed the latter at a talk held at The Millroom.

But among the coolest of Suzuki’s products is the $75 Ototo synthesizer. It’s about the size of a business card and has 12 touch inputs, an onboard speaker and a headphone output. Four sensor inputs allow you to plug in any object and then touch said object to activate sound. At The Millroom, Suzuki plugged in a tomato.

Here’s the Kickstarter video from earlier this year:

But Suzuki does much more than make music with produce. He created a series of robots that perform in a video by the Japanese pop band Androp. The work was commissioned by creative agency Party; the robots are “controlled with MIDI signal and dedicate to design movement with their up coming single Words Words Lights.”


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