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We’ve been running a special rebroadcast of the first season of Sound Builders, our show about noise (and the people rethinking how to make it), all week on Motherboard. We hope it tides you over until the forthcoming season of Sound Builders, which you can catch here later this month.
First, here’s Steve Mann, a professor and instrument designer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Some call him the world’s first cyborg. When he’s not fighting for you cyborg rights, Mann uses an unlikely pairing of brainwaves and compressed hydraulic fluids to rethink how to create sound.
Back in 2010, Mann, who also founded the Wearable Computers Group at MIT’s Media Lab, invited us to his Toronto studio to hear about some of his past inventions, and also check out his underwater pipe organ. It’s a highly-tactile, mellifluous instrument that Mann hopes will offer a new method for the deaf and blind to create music. He calls it the Hydraulophone.
Stay tuned for the premiere of our next season of Sound Builders right here on Motherboard.
Watch More Sound Builders:
Watch Psych-Pop Duo Peaking Lights Make Sound Waves with Recycled Electronics:
Watch Sound Designer Diego Stocco Build a ‘Mad Mac’-Style Bass With Pipes:
Reed Ghazala, the Father of Circuit Bending:
This Robotic Guitar Looks Nothing Like a Robot or a Guitar (But It Still Shreds):
This Is What an Underwater Pipe Organ Sounds Like:
The Fine Art of Turning (Toy) Weapons Into Guitars:
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