A Russian artist has spliced a synthesizer with a telephone to create a contender for the world’s most annoying apparatus.

The Prankophone dials a number and blasts the person on the other end with a unique melody created from their phone number. The speakers on the device transmit both the synthesized sounds and the sound from the person at the other end, but the other person can only hear noise from the synth.

“Nowadays it’s averting to hear in the phone receiver any sound other than human voice,” explains the machine’s creator, Dmitry Morozov, who says he was inspired by the connection between electronic music and the development of telephone and telegraph equipment.

“Music means that we have to wait for the answer of the operator; strange electronic noises imply some mistake in decoding. Thus the sound from Prankophone would be perceived as some kind of mistake, though in reality it is an individual and anonymous sound message, a micro-noise piece which is unique for each number it managed to reach.”

Find out more about Morozov’s ::votl:: project and watch the Prankophone in action below. [via Electronic Beats]

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