LookingOut4: Ding

Project1: Skube - A Last.fm & Spotify Radio

By:  Andrew Nip, Andrew Spitz, Ruben van de Vleuten, Malthe Borch

Homepage: http://www.soundplusdesign.com/?p=5516

Keywords: tangible, portable music player, laser cutting, collaborative interaction, industrial design

Skube is a music player that allows people to discover and share music and facilitates the decision process of picking tracks when in a communal setting. It has two modes, Playlist and Discovery. Playlist plays the tracks on your Skube, while Discovery looks for tracks similar to the ones on your Skube so you can discover new music that still fits your taste. When Skubes are connected together, they act as one player that shuffles between all the playlists.



This working prototype is a combination of using Arduino, Max/MSP and an XBee wireless network. The Last.fm API is used to populate the Skube with tracks and scrobble, and using their algorithms to find similar music when in Discover mode. Then Spotify is used to play the music. Moreover, they use XBees for the wireless communication between the Skubes and to the computer using custom software that manages all this.



Project2: The Barcode Piano

By:  Marco Triverio, Hao-Ting Chang, Helle Rohde Andersen

Homepage: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~mtriveri/Marco_Triverio/Tangible_barcodes.html

Keywords: tangible music instrument, barcode, laser cutting



Barcode Piano is a music instrument and a toy for children to explore and understand the essential principles behind barcodes. By producing different sound, it helps people to understand the unique information of barcode and can be used to identify entities such as mail, products or patients by reading the unique information embedded in the barcode’s numbers and lines.

This project is not complicated, just as it indicates in the website that it was built in four days; but I like its mapping from barcode to music and help people have a better understanding about barcode. It's simple and easy but directly effective.