Bees built it, Arduino brought it to life

Daric Gill used an Arduino UNO R3 to create his “The Translation Machine” sound art installation for an exhibition at the Dunn Museum. Except he didn’t do it alone, because bees helped with its construction.

The Translation Machine is a motion-triggered interactive art piece that plays sounds that Gill collected during his world travels. He recorded those using binaural microphones, which approximate human ears (including the distance between them) to produce spatial audio like we hear in the real world. It plays those sounds when someone comes within view of its passive infrared (PIR) sensor. And it monitors their distance with an ultrasonic sensor, pumping up the volume as they get closer.

The enclosure that contains the Arduino and other components, plus the amplification horns for the speakers, are made of sassafras wood. That isn’t very common for woodworking these days, but Gill reclaimed the wood from an old barn.

The best part of this project, however, is the incorporation of honeycombs built by bees. While he was traveling and capturing those binaural recordings, Gill left the sassafras wood speakers horns at The Bee Collective. They seeded those horns with starter wax, which encouraged their bee colonies to construct honeycombs within the horns. Now, at the exhibition, anyone approaching “The Translation Machine” will hear the sound filtered through honeycomb.