Oct 29, 2008

Furniture Made of... Sound!

We all know that music can be inspirational and can help you to get in a mood and a state of mind conducive to creation. But in this case I am not talking about that type of relationship between music and inspiration. I am talking about a piece of furniture literally built based on sounds.

How so? This sofa/chair is an exact replica of a soundwave graph. As simple and complex as that. This is how this piece of furniture looks like:



When you see it in a close up (below) the music waves and patterns are more clear to the eye. Prototypes of the chair were exhibited in Milan 2007, and the final product was launched at the London Design Festival in September and was in sale -since September 2008 and for the duration of 6 weeks-, at Selfridges (UK) at the price of £3950. The chair has also been exhibited in Tokyo and Birmingham.

Close ups:





Created by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, a London-based designer of British and Colombian nationality and the designer of the "London Igloos", these chairs are "the initial stage of a project exploring the translation of furniture into sound and sound into furniture."

Couple of interesting facts about this work:

- 719 sounds were made to finally reach the one produced as a chair.

- The designer made his own programming to graph the sounds.

- They are made of polyethylene foam, water-jet cut, but the first prototype was hand-cut expanded polystyrene.

This is another good example of how by intertwining ideas, concepts or objects that at first glance may seem impossible to "cross" creativity can flow and produce innovation. This project in particular involved sounds, design, math and programming but more important so the idea the original idea that sound could be translated into furniture (and the other way around).

Link to Plummer-Fernandez

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