Principal Investigator Tod Machover
Project Website http://www.media.mit.edu/projects/talking-drums/overview/
“The Talking Drums” is a sound installation where we created a modular system for sending images through rhythmic patterns. It is an encrypted language to empower a musical community by sending secret messages, avoiding surveillance and listening to each other. It’s inspired by the communication method and instrument used by African communities to send messages across the continent. They did this by drumming, and by a rhythmic language that only could be understood by the community.
For the installation we collected different objects from MIT’s dump, especially obsolete technologies, such as hard drives, screen.