We’re in danger of letting technology run away from us altogether, as it becomes an all-consuming repository of memories, whether it’s text, images, audio, or video. We’re already used to our devices serving up unexpected and occasionally unwanted reminders of times gone by, gatekeeping our relationship with the past.
So what if this relationship was a little bit more mindful? That’s the thinking behind this new collaboration between Map Project Office and Father, two London-based creative agencies, one specialising in industrial design and the other in music and sound design.
The ‘Sonic Heirloom’ brings together their respective talents to create a piece of slow technology, a wall-mounted ‘player’ that’s designed to be a repository for audio-based memories. Described by the design team as a ‘speculative object’, and shaped from leather, glass and cast metal, Sonic Heirloom takes the form of a recording puck and a playback device.
The former is a compact digital recorder, about the size of a large coin, that can be carried unobtrusively and switched on with a click to capture the immediate soundscape. These recordings can then be played back by docking the puck with the glass vitrine, a cubic structure that also houses the leather-clad player and the bell.
The bell is the visual heart of the device, a bowl created in collaboration with a traditional foundry and formed from tin and copper to create a unique resonant form that turns on playback. As it does so, it picks up reverberations from the player and ‘emits an immersive, resonating chime’.
This runs alongside the sounds you’ve captured using the puck, and Map and Father believe that the association between sound, place, and memory is vivid enough to survive the audio component being taken out of context and used as a welcome emotional trigger.
‘Rather than allowing sound to passively complement the visual, Sonic Heirloom invites users to embrace sound as a primary sense for storytelling and memory,’ the team write, pointing out that the design of the device was ‘inspired by historical sonic tools imbued with meaning, such as bells and clocks’.
As the name suggests, they imagine the Sonic Heirloom being passed down through the generations, with each new owner inheriting a set of audio memories.
Sound is already used as a method for conjuring up ambience and atmosphere, from white noise generators to the myriad loops of immersive environment and weather noises that exist on YouTube. By placing control of sound creation in our hands and imbuing that sound with emotion and memory as well as atmosphere, Sonic Heirloom is a step towards to a more meaningful and engaging piece of technology.
‘By uniting industrial and sound design, Sonic Heirloom transforms sound into a medium for treasuring and sharing our stories, inviting a deeper, more intentional engagement with the ephemeral essence of memory,’ say the designers.
