Filippo Sanzeni

Subsonic is a project focussed on the fruitful entanglement of design, science, sound and the public sphere. My goal is to advance both design and science by “thinking about the future of science in the context of design – as well as design in the context of science” (Ito, 2016) and to prototype the process in a way which is in accordance with open source and DIY methodologies. The background for this impulse lies in three loosely related notions: anti-disciplinarity, DIY bioacoustics and citizen science. 

I developed an Open Source and low-cost piezoelectric sensor, able to pick up sub-hearing oscillations produced by insects. The data generated, after being analysed by a machine learning algorithm based on a technique called t-SNE, is able to flag potential phytoplasma (a particularly destructive bacterial parasite) outbreaks in farms.