Sound/chair — by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

He was born in Colombia and started blending industrial techniques with music while studying mechanical engineering at King's College, London.

Long story short: "His Sound/chair, on sale for £3,950 at Designersblock's pop-up shop at Selfridges [Oxford Street flagship store, 4th floor] during the [London Design Festival], began as a sound, drawn on a graph using volume, time and frequency plots; the shape was then crafted into a chair made from water-jet-cut polyethylene," wrote Nicole Swengley in the September 13, 2008 Financial Times.

From the designer's website:
....................

Sound/chair

The chair is an exact replica of a sound wave graph. The result is a product with dual existence as both a sound and a chair.

Sound/chair is the initial stage of a project exploring the translation of furniture into sound and sound into furniture. The link between the two is that sound can be visualized as a 3-dimensional object when it is graphed mathematically on a volume/time/frequency plot.

When sound is presented in this manner, the beautiful and unexplored aesthetic of sound is discovered; a landscape of spikes and shapes that vary accordingly to the type of sound. This is taken further by altering the sound's volume, length and frequencies to create a sound wave in the shape of a chair. The end result is a chair that carries the inherited aesthetic of sound and also a chair that can be heard as a sound.

The 3-dimensional graph is used as the lines to create the full-scale chair, made up of layers of polyethylene foam.

Dimensions: -31dB x 1.35s / 80cm W x 70cm D x 85cm H.

Material: Polyethylene foam, water-jet-cut (1st prototype was hand-cut expanded polystyrene.

*New facts revealed April 2008:

1) I do my own programming to graph the sounds.

2) I made 719 sounds to finally reach the one I produced as a chair.

3) There is a lot of mathematics involved in the process as the frequency domain has to be extracted from the data and plotted against time and volume.
....................

Note: The man in black in the fourth photo from the top is the designer.