Think about her song 'Images.' Consider the simplicity of the recording: just her voice and a microphone—elemental, yet achingly beautiful. Bringing that song’s full emotional depth, every tremor of that extraordinary spirit, to life has been our aspiration for years.
Simplicity is anything but easy. We've worked with legendary sound-system designers, and the best scientists of sound. We've reimagined speakers from the ground up. We now dare say that our speakers might well be the best to listen to Nina Simone.
Utterly low use of materials. Made in the East Village in New York. One by one, we'll design, build, install and tune them for you.
Here hanging our second installation, this one for the lovely folks at Betaworks.
The Macaw Sanctuary is an incredible rainforest in Costa Rica. It used to be grazing land just 30 years ago. Now it’s wild. 350 species of birds live there. The most beautiful place we know.
Sanctuaries like Macaw depend mostly on tourism for economic viability, but that’s hardly sustainable. Sound can create revenue for protected areas like Macaw, with only positive effects. Natural sound is the product of a land that is alive and, as such, it is very scarce.
We use all of the sound data gathered for bioacoustics research in collaboration with leading teams of researchers. Bioacoustics is of vital importance for environmental research, helping us monitor and act on the health of ecosystems. And, remember: it sounds amazing.
Oda is alive.
The dream always is to convey emotion from afar.
Like the emotion we sometimes feel when listening to Nina Simone.
And after eight years of dedication
we think these speakers bring that feeling to life.
The way to do it: music that emanates from a resonant soundboard,
like instruments have done
for thousands of years.
Made in paper and fabric.
Colorful and light and gentle
like mobiles.
We've just started taking orders.
We'd love to make speakers for you.
The speakers are also a portal to another place: we’ve put microphones in a beautiful forest and we send the live sound to the speakers in real-time.
Please listen:
It feels like you live there.
You wake up to the dawn chorus and
go to bed lulled by frog and toad.
A delicate, emotive connection
with some high-tech behind it.
It's a serene experience: like opening a window of sound to a beautiful place.
Three benefits to this experience:
we feel a kinship with nature,
we support the people that keep
the land alive (it’s fair trade sound) and
we push bioacoustics research forward.
This sound will calm your spirit.
And it tells a story of hope and
optimism for a wilder future.
This is Fair Trade Sound: the people who keep the land alive are those
compensated for its sound.
Sound tells us how our natural world is doing. Let's listen, really listen.