Musical grill blasts beats through your teeth

The Play-A-Grill MP3 player takes style cues from rap culture, but its far more than a fashion statement. (Aisen Caro Chacin / Popular Science)

Personal music listening habits have come a long way over the years -- from record players in the bedroom and boomboxes in the street to headphones in your ears and, believe it or not, MP3 players in your mouth.

If Aisen Chacin's "Play-A-Grill" catches on, the future of music could indeed be more personalized - and blingier - than ever before.

Chacin, a student at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, has designed a bejeweled mouthpiece in the style of a rap grill that's able to conduct sound through human teeth.

Music is transmitted using a process called bone conduction. Basically it travels from the tooth, through the skull to the eardum, eliminating the need for an external audio player.

"The Play-A-Grill attempts to provide a display that challenges our perception of listening, altering the body's natural sound output and relocating as an input," said Chacin says when she presented her invention at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference in Michigan last week.

The removable grill, which sticks to the roof of your mouth, features basic control buttons on its underside. The person wearing it can skip songs and adjust the volume using his or her tongue.

If the music is loud enough, the concave shape of the human palate will actually make the vibrations resonate, resulting in a human speaker effect. Talk about a sweet party trick!



Time magazine notes that this type of technology could be used beyond the Play-A-Grill to help people with disabilities and hearing impairments, but Chacin herself says that her motivation was more artistic than scientific.

"Playa-Grill combines a digital music player with the mouth piece jewelry known as a grill, which is usually associated with hip hop and rap music genres," she wrote in a paper accompanying the project. "This piece of jewelry presents a perfect opportunity to merge an arbitrary music fashion object and reintroduce it as the music player itself."

Would you wear a musical mouthpiece if it were available? How much would you pay to get your hands on one of these fancy grills?