Swedish designer Love Hultén has an impressive eye for detail and clearly holds the classic arcade machines and computers that provide the basis for his hand-crafted retro tributes in high regard. Without question, they're all gorgeous. His latest work, however, is the stuff of childhood nightmares. Mr Typo is a wall-mounted speech synthesizer that outputs garbled computer speech which can be manipulated by poking his eye or punching his teeth.
Handmade in wood, Mr Typo comes in two flavors - a skeletal form and a full-bodied version, which are charmingly described by Hultén as being with or without meat. Either way, the battery-powered device has a huge square head and a flat body hanging underneath, with links at the joints that flail and flop about when handled.
The bizarre speech synth is powered on by pulling down the body, which causes the spongy membrane showing through the cracked skull to the right to light up.
Mr Typo makes use of a Raspberry Pi mini computer board to rearrange any loaded-in text file in real time and outputs the chopped up sentences using Markov chains and a vocal synth engine created by Bjorn Eriksson.
Meanwhile an Axoloti Core computer takes care of voice modulation options dialed in by twisting the big eyeballs out front or pushing in buttons made to look like teeth. Voice mods include pitch shifting, reverb and chorus.
This is certainly an odd build from Hultén, but has a certain dark appeal. Unlike some of his other work, Mr Typo looks like it's been created just for creepy fun and is not currently listed for sale. You can see and hear the "meat" version make a mess of some recipes and dissect a surgery guide in the video below.
Source: Love Hultén Design