Final Project Proposal 2.0: Ding

Final Project Proposal 2.0

EnSing

Project Intent:

Basically, the purpose of this project is to build a portable radio/music player box in the home environment which could be placed in the desk or be attached on the wall and could sense its surrounding environment and recommend specific songs to users. This idea originates from the opinion that sometimes environment could be a good context and could generate certain "mood" to transfer into music.

Reference Project:

Skube by Andrew Nip, Andrew Spitz, Ruben van der Vleuten, Martin Malthe Borch


Frijilets by Inbal Lieblich, Umesh Janardhanan and Andrew Stock

• Omnion by Ana Catharina Marques, Kostantinos Frantzis, Markus Schmeiduch, Momo Miyazaki

Jing.FM by Kaiwen Shi
Music could also has emotion. People find specific songs according to their description.

Sadly By Your Side

Brief description: 

This device consists of two parts: the body and a lot of different caps (gadgets). The body is the core to get sensor data, process information, transmit and receive music. The caps are sensitive to different type of context signal. Using different cap will capture corresponding environmental information. Basically, there are four types of caps.
(1) Control caps: get the signal from an accelerometer/tilt sensor to play the next song and volume.

(2) Context data caps: get some low level sensor data such as smell, color, temperature, speed and so on.

(3) Human activity caps: get people's facial expression when people come by or listen to people's humming for certain melody to get more similar songs.

(4) filter caps: this type of caps will bring some effects to the song, such as changing the pitch or timbre, or even some funny sound during the playing of a piece of song.

Moreover, this device has two modes: the search mode and generate mode. In the first mode, input data will be transformed into some specific tags according to its type and value; then these tags are used to described a series of songs to users. As to the second mode, people use several different caps to change the input data in order to create a piece of generative music. For example, with a light cap to sense its surrounding light and a video cap to record the emotions of people, the changes of input data will generate different non-repeated sound.

Sketch:

Diagram:

Hardware:

Plan I: Sensors + Arduino/Teensy + Rasbery Pi + Wifi adapter
Plan II: Sensors + Arduino/Teensy + xbee/wixel + sensors(transmitting circuit) + PC/mobile phone

Software (Under investigation):

Plan I: Python + Arduino IDE + MAX + JingFM/Last.fm API + Ecoprint API
Plan II: Processing + Arduino IDE + JingFM/Last.fm API + Ecoprint API

Technology keywords:

Laser cutter + tangible control + context sensing + modular player

Goal:

Finish the main body building, at least three caps (controller, environment, listening) under two different mode. Try to develop more scenarios and