Jeppe Groen, Bart Hengeveld
For centuries, music has been created with purely acoustic and mechanical musical instruments. But as technology advances, the tools used to create music change with it. Electronic music instruments allow for new ways to create and manipulate sounds, resulting in a broad range of musical possibilities. However, many electronic music instruments suffer from the same problem; there is a steep learning curve for beginners. In addition, the interface design of these tools can also form a barrier for newcomers. Music-making should inherently be a fun process, however, this is not what is currently being achieved for people without professional experience.
Should technology make it easier to create music?
Soundsnip aims to solve these issues. It's an easy-to-use musical instrument that allows you to record sounds and then create rhythms and melodies with these sounds. Tangible interface elements make it easy to understand how the device works. The sounds are represented physically with coloured blocks, making it easy to keep track of them. Snippets of sounds can be recorded and edited with the handheld ‘recorder’ device, the sound and its settings are stored on the corresponding block.
When these blocks are placed on the ‘sequencer’ device, rhythms and melodies can be created with the sounds. Soundsnip encourages a fun experience in which the use of everyday sounds can be explored. In the design process, ideas were explored through prototyping and iteration. The most understandable and fun-to-use concepts were combined into one functional prototype.
In this project, we explored a new way of creating electronic music. Some interactions were designed specifically with their function in mind, with the goal of representing the function through form. The application of these specifically designed tangible interactions should make it easier to understand how to use musical instruments in the future, and perhaps this can also be applied to other devices.
