A Requiem For Meters

Smart Energy GB are the organisation campaigning for the roll-out of smart energy meters in the UK. Publicizing smart meters and making traditional electricity and gas meters look obsolete is part of their mission, and towards the end of last year they came up with a novel idea. “Requiem for Meters”, is a piece of orchestral music performed on instruments made from old gas and electricity meters, and recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London.

The old meters serve as much as artworks in some of the instruments as they do a function. As far as we can see for example the gas meter violins are electric instruments rather than acoustic, the meter serving only as the physical body of the instrument rather than as an acoustic cavity in the way the body of a traditional violin does. The wind instruments seem to incorporate the cavity of a gas meter in their construction though and the percussive instruments are very much dependent on the properties of the meters themselves, though we’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the resulting sound is one you’d want regularly on your hi-fi.

The video below the break shows some of the background to the piece, though sadly not as much instrument building detail as we’d like.

It’s worth mentioning that UK smart meters have come in for their share of criticism, and not just for the project’s huge cost. There are privacy concerns surrounding the amount of information about individuals that could be gleaned from the data they collect, as well as security issues concerning the potential for vulnerabilities in internet-connected electronic devices with control over high-power appliances fitted to millions of homes.

We’ve covered smart meters plenty of times before here on Hackaday, most recently a community-driven smart meter project in a Parisian suburb. We haven’t covered a gas meter orchestra before though, but these instruments made from firearms come close. Or how about these instruments made from ice?

Thanks [adnbr] for the tip.

 

Filed under: musical hacks