Nick Zammuto of The Books explains his Spoonbox:

"This will take a little bit of explaining. I built this prototype of the Spoonbox out of wood, plexiglass, zinc plates, measuring spoons, and closeout radioshack parts. It hooks up to a CD player and small amplifier which cause the spoons to dance. There are small speakers behind the spoons that move in response to the sounds on the CD which I carefully composed using low frequency sine waves and kitchen sounds. The speakers, in turn, blow small puffs of air into the spoons which cause them to bounce/vibrate in rhythmic patterns. It really must be seen to be understood, but this video might give you some sense of what it does."



Further comments via Cokemachineglow:

CMG: Yeah, I was looking at your website and I saw the Spoonbox. That’s amazing. How did you come up with the idea for that?
NZ: Thanks. Sound is motion of the air, that’s all it is. Motion of the air is created by various things, speakers being one of them. I wanted to use that to create not only movement in the air but also movement through objects. One idea that I came up with was to use a small puff of air from a more bass-y end of the frequency to use the spoons while there are other sounds coming out of the speakers as well. It plays with inside and outside a lot as well—what’s in the box and what’s coming out of the box. It bridges the gap between recorded medium that’s representational and one that’s purely phyical or visceral.
CMG: Then I’m guessing you’re probably behind the drums on “An Animated Description of Mr. Maps” as well.
NZ: Yeah, I had that idea a long time ago. It sort of reared it’s ugly head years ago, to install a subwoofer inside of a filing cabinet and sort of play on the whole idea of industrial music. I went to Wal-Mart and bought this really cheap filing cabinet and put a subwoofer inside of it. It sort of had this resonant frequency to it already, which became the tuning for the track. It was roughly C-Sharp. We tuned everything to that.

The Books - "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps"