The Chairs We Heard.Unlearning Chairs Through Sound, Emotion, and Synesthesia
Sound-translated furniture: The Chairs We Heard is an experimental furniture project that explores sound as a design method, translating collective listening, emotion, and intuitive drawing into two chairs shaped by contrasting musical genres. The project challenges conventional ways of designing furniture through synesthetic and sensory processes.
The process began through collective listening sessions where participants listened to metal, progressive rock, jazz, and other mainstream music genres, and responded intuitively with no direct instructions through drawings, words, and colors. These became emotional maps and prompts of rhythm, intensity, movement, and atmosphere, allowing sound to be translated into visual and eventually physical qualities.
The sessions then evolved into forming chairs. The Metal Chair translates the speed, aggression, and angularity of metal into sharp and compressed forms, while The Progressive Rock Chair responds to the genre's layered rhythms through slower gestures, transitions, and a more architectural structure. Their colors similarly derive from the emotional associations gathered through listening and stated by the participants.
The produced chairs serve as a tangible manifestation of the sound and music used as material for thinking through form, shifting design away from a predetermined solution and toward a sensory, intuitive, and collaborative process. In doing so, it asks how tacit knowledge, what we feel, hear, and intuitively recognize, can participate in shaping the objects around us.
Design: Marcelo Guajardo Dávila
Status: Produced
Exhibitions:
Publications/Press:
- DEZEEN - Stockholm Desgin Week events guide
- Glocal Design Magazine - Mexican Design in a Global Context
- Archipanic - Design Thrives in the Swedish Capital
- RSVP Excelsior - Las Sillas que Escuchamos
- Designaholic - A Mexican Chair Explores Sound as Design Method
- Aalto University - Personal Projects
Materials: 18mm plywood
Methods: Collective listening, sound translation, intuitive drawing, synesthetic processes, digital modelling, CNC milling, manual fabrication.
Dimensions: Metal Chair — 480 × 520 × 1050 mm Prog Rock Chair — 480 × 480 × 950 mm
Produced in: Espoo, Finland
Year: 2026
Photography: Marcelo Guajardo and Mattia Anderle
Listening is a way of making.