This cool interactive art piece gives new life to old vinyl records. Created by designer/musician Yuri Suzuki, in collaboration with mechanical engineer Yaroslav Tenzer, the Sound Chaser uses chopped up curved slices of vinyl records and turns them into a custom musical track for a set of miniature trains to follow.

Participants connect the vinyl record slivers into any configuration they’d like, and the trains follow along the track, creating user-generated music mash-ups.

Now I have no idea how they managed to get such perfect slices out of these records, but they somehow figure out a way to do it accurately enough to keep the tiny trains from derailing.

Each train car has its own independent guidance system, needle, speaker and amplification, so they’re completely self-contained. They seem to have gotten their inspiration for these trains from the oh-so-awesome Vinyl Killer I featured a while back.

Check out the video clip below to see (and hear) the Sound Chaser train in action:

Now isn’t that music to your ears? These guys need to package these up with slices of records and mass produce ’em. I think they’d have a hit on their hands.

[via The Dapper Alchemist]