Ceramic Beats
A step sequencer built out of The Met’s open collection. Each of the nine
tracks is a material the museum’s own catalogue names, and every tile you
strike is a real object of that material, cropped from its photograph —
44,354 of them to draw from.
The sounds are strikes on the nine bodies themselves, generated with the
ElevenLabs sound-effects API from a physical description of each fired body
being hit. What separates them is what separates the materials: how hot each
was fired, and so how long it rings. Unfired clay is dead, terracotta thuds,
and the vitrified bodies — porcelain, faience, fritware — ring like the glass
they very nearly are.
