EchoBot
A sound camera that captures environmental sounds with its ears
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Concept: Merve Akdogan, Selin Dursun, Yinghou Wang
Time: October 2023
Role: Object Design, Fabrication, Concept Design, Physical Computing, Visualization
Instructor: Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
EchoBot is an innovative auditory environment analyzer designed to capture and identify distinct voices from the environmental soundscape. Harnessing the power of YAMnet, a state-of-the-art sound classification model, Echo-bot can distinguish and categorize diverse sound sources and output them as ASCII symbols.
Based on the level/ closeness of the sound, the symbols get smaller/ larger, or denser/ more sparse.
EchoBot brings forward the “politics of things”, making us more responsible for understanding and engaging with our auditory surroundings. Symbols reflect the varying levels of ‘closeness’ between humans and the environment, emphasizing the web of relationships that Latour often speaks of.
