The first idea of Niklas Reppel was to build a DIY binaural dummy head microphone, as commercial ones come at a price that prohibits experimentation in nature (like, lowering the microphone into a crevice or gorge, or putting it out in the rain).
On the other hand, decent microphone capsules, are relatively affordable. So that led him to think, “why should the human head always be the reference? What if I make something more modular and build a set of ear-shaped microphones that I can stick to anything? That’d allow me to explore the sound of the world from the perspective of non-human entities, such as teapots, or plants, or bridges, while maintaining a certain binaural quality.“
In fact, looking at the world from the perspective of things, rather than humans, seems to be a recent trend in UX research. See it here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3450390
If we can make things talk, we should be able to make things listen, right?
This will be his project this year: building oddly-shaped microphones from decent capsules, and sticking them to anything he can find, to explore the sound of the world from a not-totally-human perspective. With the recorded material, Niklas will create immersive soundscapes, improvised or composed with
his own open-source live coding language (Mégra), and implemented on the Blaž Pavlica Sound Dome, to make the sound of the world (according to a teapot) accessible to the interested listener. He’ll also bring a wireless transmitter so that the listening things might even be live contributors to the dome performances.