Music Illustration of the Day

This looks way too small here, but click on this fabulous illustration by Julia Hasting in today's New York Times Magazine. It accompanies an item in the Year in Ideas issue. Noah Vawter, a grad student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has invented a device that receives ambient sound from the environment, amplifies it, and organizes it into pattern-based music that gets played back through headphones in real time. It makes a kind of music out of the sound that surrounds every day. I'd try it. I know I listen to the world more intensely when I'm listening through a radio recording rig and a stereo microphone. Everyone should try it. I think I'll see if my niece and nephew are into it at Christmas.