Long before the Waterbed came onto the market as a lifestyle commodity in the late 1960s, there were several mentions of water mattresses.
Early water mattress designs were aimed at fulfilling medicinal purposes: increasing comfort of patients and reducing complications resulting from long term bed rest. In three of his science fiction works, Robert A. Heinlein, himself having spent quite some time in hospitals, painted a vision of the water mattress as the futuristic hospital bed, on which one would float and barely feel their own weight.
Drawing on Heinlein’s vision, we built the sounding waterbed to explore the properties of physical sound vibrations transmitted through a body of water. The Heinlein Bed is an instrument, which other sound artists, music therapists and musicians are invited to experiment with, thus continously exploring and expanding it’s possibilities.
