Looking a little like a cross between a darts board and a record player, Theometrica is inspired by the traditional Chinese medicine practice of acupuncture. The instrument, or sound interface, creates and controls sounds in real time, sounds that are generated by fixed pins in a spinning disk.

Beyond its cultural dimension the sculpture is meant to create a space for sound events based on different geometrical arrangement of the pins. The development of the prototype composed of 99 prepared pins, a distance sensor and a software using Max/MSP, constitutes the kick-off of a research project dedicated to the correlation between geometry, probability and sound synthesis generation with an emphasis on performance.

The installation by Oscar Palou and Alexander Müller-Rakow was recently on display in Berlin at the Designtransfer space, a cross-disciplinary gallery run by the Berlin University of Art UdK.

Projects featuring alternative sound generation and the translation of music into a tangible experience have been cropping quite frequently recently, just take a look at ideas such as Synaesynth and Tingle.