Luca Yupanqui's album Sounds of the Unborn arrives this April.
We’ve all heard of child prodigies before, but surely this one has got to take the cake: talented toddler Luca Yupanqui is set to release her debut album Sounds of the Unborn, a collection of musical recordings created using biosonic MIDI technology.
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Sounds of the Unborn
Sounds of the Unborn, which is slated for released via Sacred Bones on Friday April 2, marks the first time an album has ever been recorded by a person inside the womb.
The album was crafted over the course of five hour long sessions through a clever array of biosonic MIDI devices that Luca’s father Iván Diaz Mathé (Lee Scratch Perry collaborator, and de-facto producer/engineer of the album) hooked up to the stomach of her mother Elizabeth Hart (bassist of Psychic Ills) – who functioned as both a music studio and executive producer of sorts, we suppose.
The MIDI devices then captured Luca’s prenatal movements and transformed them into MIDI data to be performed on Iván’s collection of synthesisers, with the couple letting the ‘free–form meditations flow without much interference, just falling deeper into trance and feeling the unity’.
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After Luca was born, Iván and Elizabeth went about mixing and editing the recordings while their infant daughter was present in the studio, with a statement announcing the album noting that ‘She would open her eyes wide and stare at her parents, seemingly recognizing her own sounds from the womb, knowing that they were revisiting those rituals that made them come together as one.
‘Those mixing sessions were technically the first time Luca had heard her own music, but her reaction made it clear that that wasn’t really the case — she had already lived it.’
To promote the album, Sacred Bones are bundling Sounds of the Unborn with the same MIDI Biodata Sonication Device used by Iván, Elizabeth and Luca used to record the album.
Users can attach the electrodes of the device to any living organism to transfer their vibrations into MIDI data and be played back with a maximum five voices of polyphony on a compatible piece of gear, such as a hardware synthesiser or soft synth inside your DAW.
While this process isn’t particularly new in itself – you might remember those funky Pink Oyster Mushrooms that went viral with their modular synth serenade back in December – Sounds of the Unborn does mark the first time it’s been applied to a foetus and released as an album, marking a massive moment in the development of music technology and debunking any excuses for you to not be working on music. If an unborn child can do it, why can’t you?
Listen to the first track from Sounds of the Unborn below, and find out how to preorder a MIDI Biodata Sonication kit alongside the record here.
Sounds of the Unborn arrives via Sacred Bones Records on Friday April 2.
