by Janice Li, Renata Brenha, and Marika Grasso

Is it really possible to draw a line between living and dead food? ‘Living food’ can be seen as a tagline across labels from different products in health food stores; however, food goes through various stages of life through different food-processing methods (germination, fermentation, dehydration, boiling, oxidation, etc), transcending the binary opposition of living and dead.

This spectrum of living activities in food, is exactly what we want to explore.

Our design aims to bring new possibilities to sonify the internal life of food, such that people will be able to sense the energy of food, beyond their common usage of the sight, smell, and taste - with sound as an essential sensory stimuli - in a range of audible experience rooted in scientific innovation. Through molecular spectroscopy, infrared imaging and analytical chemistry, like the technology Illuminate and SCiO are developing respectively, the nutritional components could be decoded for each individual food object by simply scanning and deep machine learning. The data will then be re-interpreted into sound to reveal a range of living activities, not in a burst of ephemeral sensations, but a consistent, music-like experience.