How do we design instruments that invite exploration? How does changing the sound of your own body change how you experience the world or even who you are? What music hides in forgotten objects, and how can we reveal it? This talk presents 20 years of creative technology research exploring how everyday objects, bodies, environments, and interactions can enable musical discovery, expression, and intervention. Projects range from tabletop instruments that give voice to discarded objects to mobile applications that alter how people hear their own voices or chewing sounds to large-scale systems that transform city soundscapes into collaborative compositions. Across this work, a unifying thread comes into focus: designing sound technologies to deepen listening, reconnect us, and ground us in the real world rather than abstract us from it, transmuting the ordinary into the sonic extraordinary.
