No, he doesn’t get drunk and slur random noises or do armpit farts, this sound engineer is the real deal. He makes actual music and melodies from beer alone. Belgian beer producer, Stella Artois, whose pilsner glasses are known for their gold rims, reached out to the MIT music maker and commissioned him to spend a year building four elaborate instruments, all powered by their glasses. One instrument, pictured to the right, looks like a complex system of copper, brass and wiring that I could not explain to you if I tried. The brand even went as far as to hire the Cold War Kids to write a song using these special chalice-adorned instruments (download A Million Eyes right here for free). The Cold War Kids played their song over a pre-recorded backing track of sounds the instruments made, so cool.

You cannot produce sound by rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a Stella chalice the way you can with a wine glass, so he decided to go for a bowing effect. The twine was actually Mongolian horsehair and a keyboard controlled the degree to which a rotating carousel of chalices rubbed up against it. I could have asked him questions about it for another 30 minutes and still not have fully understood what the hell was going on. Like everyone else without an M.I.T. degree, I could only stand and sip my beer, nod pensively, and say “cool” over and over again.

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Matt Whitlock – @mattwhitlockPM