Nine Voices from Recycled PLA: Ninefold Turns 3D-Printing Scrap into a Sound Field That Shifts as You Walk Through It

Most "recycled material redesign" projects start by sanding away the seams, bubbles, and color inconsistencies, pretending the material was never discarded in the first place. Ninefold: A Distributed Resonant Field does the opposite: the translucency variations, the interplay of matte and clear surfaces, the layered textures created by mixing and reprinting discarded PLA pellets — all of it stays visible, unpolished. Because that process of being thrown away and reformed is exactly what this piece is about.

The installation is a collaboration between architect Hyojin Kwon (founder of studio Pre- and Post-), percussionist/composer/multimedia artist Jeremy Muller, and architect and materials researcher Misri Patel. The raw material is PLA print waste discarded from a lab, ground into pellets, blended with virgin material, and reprinted into nine large-scale objects via pellet-based additive manufacturing. The three-way collaboration reflects the piece's identity: this isn't simply sculpture, nor simply a sound installation — it's architectural geometry, acoustic tuning, and material research running in parallel.

Nine Objects, Nine Frequencies

These nine objects aren't nine copies from a single mold. The team used a reaction-diffusion algorithm to generate the forms, letting the shapes expand, contract, twist, and fold on their own — the results range from slender towering columns to pieces that narrow in the middle and flare out into chambers at both ends, each with its own proportions and configuration. More importantly, each piece is tuned to a specific frequency within a harmonic spectrum — functionally, they're resonators, not decoration. Arranged in a 3x3 grid, the sound source is no longer concentrated at a single speaker or point but distributed throughout the entire space. As visitors move to different positions, the combination of resonators they hear and the light-and-geometry relationships they see shift accordingly — meaning no two people walk away from the exhibit with quite the same experience.

Each resonator was built in modular segments and then assembled into a complete structure, an approach that simultaneously solves for transport, maintenance, and future reconfiguration — in other words, these nine pieces can theoretically be disassembled, moved, and rearranged into entirely different formations in another space.

Ninefold is being shown alongside the exhibition "Plastic Reimagined: Material Agency & Circular Design," which explores the application of discarded plastic at architectural scale, encompassing computational design, material experimentation, and large-scale fabrication. Placing the two projects together makes the logic clear: rather than treating plastic waste as a problem to be dealt with, it's treated as a source material capable of generating new geometries, new acoustic properties, and new spatial relationships.

The exhibition runs from July 10, 2026 at the Reeves House Visual Arts Center in Woodstock, Georgia, through September 24. A Night Viewing event on the evening of August 20 will feature a panel discussion with Kwon, Muller, and Patel, followed by a 60-minute live improvised performance by Muller — allowing the nine resonators to be truly "played" once, in a lighting and sound configuration reserved for after hours. The project is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation's ReCreateIt program, Georgia Tech's Manufacturing Institute, and its schools of architecture and music. Photography by Arsh Khanna.