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The Play-A-Grill MP3 controls can be manipulated with the tongue.

Play-A-Grill

The Play-A-Grill MP3 controls can be manipulated with the tongue.

Now, wearing grillz is about more than a fashion statement. You can use it as an MP3 player, using bone conduction to play your block rockin’ beats through your teeth. Because why not.

The Play-A-Grill combines a digital music player and the grill, the bejeweled mouthpiece most often associated with hip-hop artists. This is the brainchild of artist Aisen Chacin, of Parsons The New School for Design in New York. New Scientist shares her lovely work today.

Like a rapper’s grillz, the Play-A-Grill draws inspiration from the hated retainer, in that it sticks on your mouth-roof and covers your teeth, but is totally removable. “This piece of jewelry presents a perfect opportunity to merge an arbitrary music fashion object and reintroduce it as the music player itself,” Chacin explains on her website.

She connected a vibrating motor to an MP3 player’s headphone jack and made a mold of her upper palate. The controls face downward, so you can click them with your tongue. The vibration is strong enough to hear the music through your skull, as seen here:

If it’s loud enough, others can hear sound coming from the wearer’s mouth, according to NewSci.

“Because the grill is worn over the teeth, sound can be transmitted using bone conduction hearing instead of outside speakers or headphones,” Chacin explains. She presented the work at a New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference last week.

New Scientist