Rethinking home audio and understanding how and where people share music was the jumping point for creating Skube. We are moving more towards a digital and online music listening experience, current portable music players are not adapted for this environment. And sharing music in communal spaces is neither convenient nor easy, especially when we all have such different taste in music.

The result of our exploration is Skube, a music player that allows you to discover and share music and facilitates the decision process of picking tracks when in a communal setting.

It is a fully working prototype through the combination of using Arduino, Max/MSP and an XBee wireless network. We access the Last.fm API to populate the Skube with tracks and scrobble, and using their algorithms to find similar music when in Discover mode. Then using Applescript, we get Spotify to play the music. We use XBees for the wireless communication between the each Skubes and to the computer using custom software that manages all this.

For more information, please check out the blog post: soundplusdesign.com/?p=5516

Project by:

Andrew Nip – cargocollective.com/andrewnip
Andrew Spitz – andrew-spitz.com
Ruben van de Vleuten – rubenvandervleuten.com
Malthe Borch – ciid.dk/education/portfolio/idp12/students/malthe-martin-borch/

As part of the Tangible User Interface module at CIID ran by Vinay Venkatraman, David Cuartielles, Richard Shed, and Tomek Ness.

Music:

Artist – Kirsten & Marie
Track – My Dear
Album – Discover the Sound of Denmark