Electronic gloves and even potted plants make music in a playground for sound innovation

Musical innovation tends to happen at the nexus of experimentation, play and happy accidents. As one Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student explains in this video, the overdriven guitar fuzz sound that’s become so familiar in rock and blues was ‘discovered’ via a tech malfunction. Taking viewers inside the Voxel Lab at MIT, where students can pursue almost any idea at the intersection of music and engineering imaginable, the short film surveys several projects being built in the space. With their creations ranging from a marble-powered ‘Rube Goldberg music maker’ to a spiked, sound-generating electronic glove, participants are given the rare freedom to build new instruments and generate novel sounds – and, just maybe, stumble upon the next big thing in music.