If you’ve ever dreamed of installing an MP3 player in your mouth and turning the vibrations of your skull into a speaker system, your chance is finally here.
Artist Aisen Chacin at Parsons The New School for Design in New York has invented a new in-mouth MP3 player technology called “Play-A-Grill,” named after all those playas who wear audibly silent grillz — until now.
“Play-A Grill uses bone conduction to play sounds with vibrations on the teeth being passed to the ear drum through the skull. The idea has been suggested before, in the form of a false tooth, but Chacin wanted to make something more fashionable,” News Scientist reported.
So how exactly can you hear music through the piece of jewelry? Chacin implanted a vibrating motor that is “connected to the headphone jack of an MP3 player inside a mold of her mouth, with the player’s controls facing downwards so they could be manipulated with the tongue.” The vibrations are then able to be heard through her skull, supposedly in the form of actual music.
The only nuisance to the invention is that sometimes the music can be so loud that others can hear the same vibrations. “The palate of the wearer acts as a resonator, which allows everyone around the wearer to hear the very same sounds coming from their mouth,” Uber Review reported.
Chacin presented her work to the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference on May 21- 23 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.