Sure, Tom Hanks's iconic FAO Schwartz piano scene in Big was pretty awesome. But two decades later Scottish electropopper Calvin Harris has one-upped Big with an even bigger project: the world's first-ever "Humanthesizer," aka human synthesizer.
While Calvin's sonic experiment may seem like a sly excuse to hang out with 15 swimsuit models (rather than the lab-coated "boffins" who originally came to him with the idea), the Humanthesizer stunt does have a legitimate, scientific purpose of sorts. This is how it works:
A special electric body ink, developed by students at the Royal College Of Art in London, allows a current to be passed through the body without causing the usual painful electric shock; then, when the bodypainted participants position themselves on a series of customized electronic synthesizer pads on the floor and touch each other's hands and limbs, the currents generate synthetic sounds.
