Voice Boxes
Light-activated vocal instruments built from repurposed cigar boxes
Impact Snapshot
Cross-disciplinary creative technologist
Project-specific audience and collaborators
Physical Computing, Instrument Design, Voice Processing, Interactive Audio, Festival Installation
Outcomes
- Light-activated vocal instruments built from repurposed cigar boxes
Measured Signals
- Timeline: 2015-2018
- Team members credited: 4
Description
Voice Boxes are handmade sonic objects built from repurposed cigar boxes, each containing a microcontroller, a photocell, and a sound exciter. When a viewer lifts the lid, light enters the box and the photocell reads its intensity, triggering playback from a library of hundreds of short voice samples — consonants, extended vowels, humming, and percussive mouth sounds recorded by the performers. The samples reconfigure and reorder themselves based on how much light the viewer allows into the box, producing an unpredictable stream of vocal fragments that shifts with each opening. The sound exciter is mounted on a false floor inside the box, hidden beneath the surface where light enters. The cavity of the box itself serves as a resonating chamber, altering the vocal formant progressively as the lid opens and closes — so the box doesn't just play the voice, it reshapes it. The result is an intimate, tactile instrument where the human voice becomes a physical material molded by light and enclosure. The first iteration featured voice samples from Justin West and Jennifer Simone. Over the course of Intermedio's projects, Voice Boxes took on several different forms — each new version featured recordings from different singers and a different physical form factor, shown across multiple gallery exhibitions. The series culminated as the focal point of the 2018 installation In Place of Forgetting at the FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati.
Concept
Voice Boxes treats the human voice as raw material — stripped of language, reduced to its most elemental sonic components, then reassembled by light and physical gesture. The interaction is deliberately simple and bodily: you open a box, you hear a voice, you shape what it says by how much you reveal. The cigar box as vessel carries its own associations — something personal, stored, hidden — and the act of opening one becomes an act of listening that is also an act of composing.
Technical Details
- Microcontroller with onboard audio playback and sample sequencing
- Photocell sensor reading ambient light intensity through lid opening
- Sound exciter mounted on false floor for resonant acoustic output
- Hundreds of granular voice samples (phonemes, vowels, consonants, mouth percussion)
- Cigar box cavity used as resonating chamber altering vocal formant
- Multiple iterations with different voice performers and form factors
Team
- Sam Ferris-Morris Composer
- Justin West Composer/Designer
- Eric Blyth Designer
- Jennifer Simone Voice Performer
Capabilities
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