(Prospect, 2018)
Personal Music Devices allow individuals to listen to their favorite songs whenever and wherever they wish with excellent musical fidelity. The headphone arrangement ensures that others are not bothered by the music. Albums of music files can be purchased on cylindrical storage devices, adorned with album art, that are inserted into the headphones for listening.
…the name is a cross of kaleidoscope and acoustic. And because it’s a movie prop it doesn’t actually work but the handle turns and with your imagination quite enabled you can see the buttons are labeled like a pump organ to be depressed like piano keys, the action is like a music box where a ratio of gears turn brushes inside that slap the open tone balls and the resulting sound comes from the noise cone. The horse hair whip is mostly decorative and is intend[ed] to act like a headbangers hair flip for the performance to convey the emotion of the musician.
These headphones and musical instrument are from Prospect, an indie sci-fi film known for its world-building through the the details of material culture. As the filmmakers explain, “artifacts needed to inform the viewer as much as possible about the world of the film. Utility, cost, weight, and implications for life in an alien frontier had to be considered…these are the artifacts that express the world of the film and must hold up to scrutiny.” The film opens with Cee writing with pen and paper (in the original in-world alphabet) while listening to a song on her personal music device. Soon thereafter, she is seen loading a cylindrical cartridge into the headphones to change the music. Cee and her father are traveling to the inhospitable green moon to extract gems. The musical instrument, meanwhile, is an invention of The Sater, religious settlers of the green moon who have turned their back on the pursuit of wealth and established a small community with techniques to survive the poisonous environment. The instrument is played – delivering a beautiful hymn with the accordion-like wheeze of a cranked mechanism – in a tense scene as The Sater and prospectors sit facing each other, each having something the other needs to survive. The instrument was made by Jim Guerci, whose explanation of the design accompanies the photo above.
Text: Headphones description from Prospect wiki (https://prospect.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Music_Device, accessed Mar 4, 2025); instrument explanation from The Fringe discord community (Jimmy G, Aug 22, 2022)
Images: Prop photos from https://www.takacollective.com/prospect-sets-1; Ad from “Aurelac Prospecting: Your Guide to Getting Rich on the Green Moon” (https://imgur.com/a/aurelac-prospecting-guide-to-getting-rich-on-green-moon-fGqisra, Nov 6, 2018)