Mew is part cat, part theremin

What do you get if you cross a cat with a theremin? Probably something a little bit like Mew. Mew is a furry interactive sound installation that purrs and responds to strokes with meow sounds that distort according to where your hands are. Press too hard and Mew will start to squeal and hiss.

Mew was developed as part of a collaborative project between students on different courses -- Design Products, Information Experience Design and Visual Communication -- at the Royal Collage of Art in London. The brief? To create a digital and physical object that responds sonically to people and its surroundings.

Emily Groves, Jackie Ford, Jakub Pollag and Paula Arntzen teamed up to create Mew, which is about the size of a window box (for plants) on stilts. The top of the box is covered with a furry material. As you approach the box, it starts to emit a purring sound in order to encourage passersby to draw near. If you stroke the fur, it will emit distorted meow sounds that are manipulated by the direction and sequence of your hand movements. There are four sound zones on the surface and the sound effect applied to the meow is dependent on how you move between them. So if, for example, you move your hand from one end in a straight line to the other, it will distort the sound in one way, but if you rub your hand back and forth over one half it will distort the sound in another way. These are played through speakers inside the box. Although the sound starts quite cat-like, as you can hear in the video it quickly starts morphing into more of a dinosaur-from-Jurassic-Park-esque squeal when you apply more pressure. Groves told Wired.co.uk that the sounds in the video are quite "violent" and that they've "tamed it down a bit to make it sound more like a cat".

Conductive thread sewn through the fur and connected to capacity sensors dictate the distortion of the meow sounds, while pressure sensors embedded in foam below the fur indicate when Mew has been stroked too forcefully. The components are run through an Arduino and controlled via a Mac Mini running a program called Max which takes care of the sound.

The idea came about when the aforementioned team was playing around with a gutter cleaner -- like a large pipe cleaner. "It was like a cat, but not a cat," explains Groves to Wired.co.uk. "We wanted to recreate that -- making an object that has lots of qualities of something but also having completely opposite qualities. It doesn't look anything like a cat, but it sounds like one."

Groves explains that they chose a grey fur for Mew because it most closely matched the colour of the conductive thread that they were using. "The thread looks awful in other types of fur," she says. As for the form factor: "We wanted it to be hand height but also look a bit awkward. At one point we wanted to give it a curved back but we thought it would influence the way you stroke it too much."

Mew has been shown a few times in public already and Groves said that the reaction has been very positive. "Overall it just makes people laugh."

"Some people have been a bit shocked or scared, but others have been putting their face on it! People generally warm to it and treat it a bit like a pet."

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Mew is part cat, part theremin