Sweet Music to our ears; A Record made from Chocolate By Christine De Jesus

       

French sound artist Julia Drouhin combined the static, pops and crackles usually heard on the radio to form an audio piece. These records can play music, and eaten afterward because they’re made out of real chocolate!

              

            Photo: Julia holding her masterpiece during the media launch of her exhibition in Hong Kong.

The Tasmanian based sound artist came up with the idea of creating edible records after a chance discovery at the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania.

Drouhin has spent the past three years refining her sound. With the help of local sculptor Ian Munday, Julia Drouhin starts by making silicone molds for her chocolate records.

With proper recipes and tools, making a chocolate Vinyl’s records is surprisingly simple.

She mixes silicone gel with a reacting agent to create the mold, which is then poured onto the original Vinyl record. Once set, tempered chocolate is then poured into the silicon mold, left inside the fridge, and after few hours placed on the turntable.

This chocolate creation gives you a musical experience like no other that you can actually eat afterward.

“It’s close to the wax that makes the cylinder, which is the ancestor of the record. I wanted to have a musical object that would fade out, disappear while it’s played,” said Drouhin in a report by South China Morning Post last February 4.

Still, each disc can only be played for the maximum of 10 times. “Because it’s being erased while it’s been played,” Drouhin explains, “so it’s just for one unique moment, in one place, one time. It’s not reproducible and it’s unpredictable.” she added.          

            

Before this, Drouhin had tried using other material such as ice water with food colorings but quickly realized a major problem, the resulting disc can only be played in freezing condition.

As for her chocolate Vinyl records, they get erased while being played on the turntable, only able to be used around 10 times before finally being eaten.

“It reminds me of the ghostly voices and lost music I was inspired by. The more you play the record, the less you can hear the original and you can hear other sounds,” she said.

So, even if people may not seem to like the music, they can just eat the chocolate. “It will end up in our stomachs anyway,” she adds.

Here’s the link for videos: https://youtu.be/G5xNCdlAffI
                                          https://youtu.be/HQC8e4EG5Lo