Tag Archives: Skin Motion

Audio tattoo

When I use the term machine/flesh, it’s usually about hardware being combined with the body (e.g., neuroprosthetics) but this news bit concerns a rather different way of integrating technology into the body. From a January ?, 2018 news item on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Newsbeat,

In the message, her grandma can be heard wishing her a happy birthday, before saying “I love you”.

She tells her granddaughter [Sakyrah Morris of Chicago, Illinois, US]: “You should be up and awake because it’s your birthday, you rock-headed little kid.”

With an app, Sakyrah is able to scan the waveform of the voice recording and play it back using image recognition.

“My grandmother passed away in May 2015 and my birthday was the month before in April,” she  told Newsbeat.

“She called me a little past midnight to wish me happy birthday and to tell me that she loved me.

“I had been holding onto that voicemail for what’s been almost three years now and I got the idea recently to get it tattooed.

“I figured it’d be something permanent that would be across my heart to be more meaningful.”

Mark Molloy’s January 5, 2018 article for The Telegraph provides more details about Morris and her audio tattoo (Note: A link has been removed),

Singer Sakyrah Morris can hear a voicemail birthday message left by her grandmother by simply hovering her smartphone camera over the soundwave tattoo.

The personalised tattoos are created by company Skin Motion using a combination of audio processing, image recognition and cloud computing.

When her grandmother passed away, Sakyrah “decided to save the voicemail in as many places as I could” and later decided to invest in a soundwave tattoo.

“About a month ago while working on one of my songs, I started to observe the sound waves on the screen and I thought that it would be great for me to get a tattoo of one with my grandmother’s voicemail,” she added.

“After doing some research, I came across a new company called Skin Motion. Their app allows you to link the image of your tattoo to the audio of your choice, so that when you hold your camera over the tattoo, the audio will play the message. …

You can hear the tattoo (from Emily Chan’s Jan. ,3 2018 Daily Mail article),

I went digging for more information about Skin Motion and found this on their About Us webpage,

Skin Motion is a tattoo artist network and patent-pending cloud platform for creating personalized augmented reality Tattoos.

In April 2017, tattoo artist Nate Siggard created the first Soundwave Tattoo™ to be played back using a mobile app. He created a video to show how it worked and the video went viral with over 280 million views.

Skin Motion was founded shortly after to make Soundwave Tattoos a reality for people all over the world who wanted to get them. Some of these people sent us messages about why they wanted to get a Soundwave Tattoo and the stories they shared inspired a team of experts to create the patent-pending augmented reality cloud platform for personalized augmented reality Tattoos.

Skin Motion is based in Los Angeles, California and has licensed Tattoo Artists from countries all over the world to create Soundwave Tattoos. You can find an artist close to you in the Tattoo Artist Directory.

A little more digging brought me to the Insider YouTube channel where I found this video, which offers a little more detail about how the technology works,

I wonder what happens should your ‘loved’ one become an ‘unloved’ one. Is the removal process the same as with a standard tattoo? Curiously, the question is not in the company’s Frequently Asked Questions.