It Rings a Bell
Sonic Heirloom, a concept work from Map Project Office and Father, records and plays audio overlaid with the ringing of its metal bowl (image: Map Project Office).
The digital audio begins to play out through the speaker, the leather-wrapped arm rubbing against the rotation of the tin copper bowl. With each spin, each circulation, the friction builds, the bowl beginning to sing clean and clear alongside the recording, overlaying the audio with soft, resonant physical vibration.
This is Sonic Heirloom, a concept work from industrial design studio Map Project Office and sound design practice Father. The object’s form may be ambiguous – a glass vitrine housing a small digital recorder, a metal bowl and leather armature – but its intention is clear. Sonic Heirloom is designed to record and play a piece of audio, all accompanied by the physical ringing of its metal bowl as it rotates. “We were talking about bells as things that mark time or which people can assign a meaning to,” explains Emilie Robinson, co-creative director of Map, “and we started to wonder about what could sound signify to people [in design].”
“Sound can often be considered as a byproduct of visual prioritisation [in the field],” adds Freddie Webb, co-founder of Father, “whereas we wanted to explore the role it plays in shaping and informing our experiences.” With this in mind, the team opted to couch their study within an exploration of the way in which sound might evoke past experiences. “How do the auditory components around us inform how we feel?” Webb asks.
Image: Map Project Office.
In contrast to commercial audio equipment, the Sonic Heirloom is deliberately limited in its technical scope – it can only record a single piece of audio on its silver speaker, which is then sealed, irretrievably, inside the glass vitrine. “There’s no way to take it back out,” explains Jake Weir, Robinson’s fellow co-creative director. “Once it’s in, it’s in.” The instrument encourages its user to select a piece of audio that is meaningful to them – someone’s voice, perhaps – with the heirloom only complete once this audio memory has been locked inside it. “In an age when you can record anything you want, it was important that it has this finite quality,” Webb explains. “We wanted to re-engage with the process of sound and pay a particular focus to one moment.”
When in full operation, the Sonic Heirloom’s recording harmonises with the ringing of the bowl – a resonance that Webb suggests creates a sense of “ritual”, and which “grounds and creates presence” for the recorded audio, eventually becoming a kind of sonic surrogate for the memory. The bowls made for the device have been hand cast, with their exteriors left rough to form what Robinson terms a “unique fingerprint” whose distinctive physical makeup is symbolically paired to the memory it resonates to. “I think both studios wanted to explore how we could bridge the gap between sound and design,” she adds, with the design intended to highlight the emotive value of audio and the manner in which it might be more fully interwoven with physical material. “Even if you're interacting with an object regularly, it's easy to forget about the sound,” Weir notes. “ But there’s so much there to play with.”
Words Oli Stratford