Affected by the epidemic, the school changed all courses to online courses which will make this a little challenging for the first teaching week of the change. Fortunately, although some unexpected things still happen, generally speaking, this week has progressed smoothly. Taking advantage of the one-week suspension period last week, our group conducted an online meeting to determine the overall idea and discuss some details according to this idea. At the same time, based on the existing ideas, we made a paper prototype and took some clips as the material for the video presentation of week 4.

Idea Description

Combined with the results of the discussion on the theme of musical metrics in the world cafe event, we are very interested in working with the theme of everyday sound. Inspired by the everyday sound hidden in Billie Eilish's song "Bury a Friend" and "Bad Guy", she uses the sound dentist drilling her teeth and the sound produced by the traffic light in Australia street as a soundtrack and mix them with different instrument and make a wonderful song.

This makes use think of we have neglected various voices in daily life, for example, the life-like sound（such as the sound of vehicles passing by, the sound of crowds, the rising and falling of birds in the morning, the delicate rhythm of the wind blowing the leaves, or the crisp sound of the rain on the ground in rainy days and etc. If we start to pay attention to the everyday sounds, we will find that there are many beautiful sounds in everyday life waiting for us to discover. During the group discussion last week we explored the playful interaction mode that can be achieved for everyday sound, that is, using chemistry experiments to simulate the sound processing process to enable people to interact with everyday sounds. The following picture is the draft of our concept.

The whole device can be regarded as a daily sound processor. The principle of the whole device is to collect sounds, recombine them, and play them. We use the props that often appear in the chemical laboratory as a presentation form and simulate the process of doing experiments to act as the way for the users to interact with everyday sounds.

Presentation

In week 4 we mainly focusing on making preparations for the group presentation. Within the group, I was responsible for making the ppt for the presentation, designing the persona, discussing what needs to be included in the presentation as well as recording my part of the research which needs to be included in the video presentation part. Our video conference this week is basically to discuss some details such as identifying the target audience and designing persona and storyboard, discussing the technologies that may be used in future implementations, and the feedback we hope to get in the presentation.

During the group discussion, we took a closer look at the target users this device can serve better with that is:

1. Music lovers and producers.
2. Those who are interested in daily sound.
3. Those who are sensitive to sound

(This refers to those who are good at discovering the sounds around them as well as those who are associative to the sound of a particular segment)

The following pictures are the personas I created.

The first persona Amy can be used as a normal user. She is a student and good at discovering the beauty in life. she would like to collect interesting sound happen in daily life and she will play it back in her free time to feel the beauty that certain moment brings to her.

Our second persona Dennis can be used as those who have musical backgrounds. He is a music producer, and he often stores some daily sounds as materials for music production as his inspiration. Also, he often tries to mix different soundtracks. Sometimes, he may come up with some surprising effects.

At first, we only had a preliminary idea about the general direction of this idea, but less technical considerations. Based on the concept and a preliminary understanding of the Arduino components at this stage, I think we may use the following device.

Recording equipment (For sound collection)

Playback device (Producing sound)

Infrared sensor(Detect the position of the dropper. When the position of the dropper is within the range of the sensor, the function of storing music will be triggered.)

Motion sensor (Trigger music playback when the flask is shaken by someone)

LED lights(Using different light to represent different sound)

In order to get feedback and better improve our concept, we invite the students who have listened to the lecture to give valuable opinions from the complexity of the idea and the playfulness of interaction.

Taken all the listed questions into consideration, we have produced the following video to present our idea in detail.

Please refer to the following link to have a look at our video presentation.

This video contains a detailed description of the background, inspiration, prototype(explaining how to use it by bodystorming), target audience, personas, storyboard, technology involved, questions involved.