Mew: The Purring, Hissing Sound Art Piece

By Kira Grunenberg

Life is full of bombarding sounds, and we tend to brush over the lot of them in the hustle of a busy day. What would it be like if such a common sound were presented in an unexpected way? Enter: Mew, a sound piece recently developed by a team of students at the Royal College of Art in London, UK.

This piece of hardware was part of SoundObject, a collaborative effort in which Emily Groves, Paula Arntzen, Jacqueline Ford, and Jakub Pollág, students in the Information Experience Design and Visual Communication, and Design Products departments of RCA, worked together to “create a digital and physical object that responds sonically to people and its surroundings.”

Asking, “What is Mew, exactly?” is a perfect segue for an infomercial style motto:

All the character of a cat, without the messy litter box cleanup!

This may be a slightly juvenile and crude description, but even with a cute name and tagline to match, this university endeavor is actually quite complex — it is loaded with technology and is hardly a child’s toy. It may look innocent on the outside but this “kitty” is packing the support of tech familiar to SoundCtrl, such as Max MSP, lots of Arduino circuitry, several pressure sensors and even a Mac mini. (If you are interested in this kind of work, see also this piece highlighting the Skube, another project that utilizes MSP and Arduino.)

The team started out with an objective in the form of a question:

“How can we manipulate people’s expectations of sound through a responsive digital physical object?”

The answer came in the form of an object that presents onlookers and those who actively approach the device with distorted sound clips that emulate a cat, but are distorted enough not to be perceived as an animal likeness of any kind. Responsive actions include: walking toward Mew, petting/stroking the fur covered interface, and pushing down on the surface. Each of these will trigger sounds. The particular cat audio that is emitted when interacting with Mew is affected by variables like amount of pressure and directionality of touch and petting movement.

Mew invites a more intimate level of interaction once someone comes with a certain distance because motion sensors signal it to start purring. Touching the fur, covered in conductive thread, tells the Arduino platforms to playback the distorted meows and any amount of pressure that exceeds the predetermined amount of force programmed into the sensors put on Mew’s foam ”body,” will prompt a stern hiss. All of these sonic reactions are controlled, shaped and changed with the Max MSP software that runs off the built-in Mac mini previously mentioned.

The contradictory nature of a non-cat like object, being built to encourage the kind of behavior one would share with a cat, fits the purposes of this academic project well enough. Still, it does posit other questions and beneficial possibilities, should the project be modeled to more naturally and closely emulate an animal. If enough sonic variety and behavioral nuances were accounted for, and worked with, for example, perhaps something like Mew be of good use as a substitute for therapy animals.

Kira is an old school music nerd with a love for all things creative; always searching for music’s common ground. She graduated with an M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University. Drop her a tweet @shadowmelody1.