Circula
Circula is an audio device designed to enhance the experience of discovering and sharing music through tactile expressions.
Completed in 2 weeks at CIID together with Kelvyn Marte and Keyur Jain, supervised by the best Italian Duo ever: Massimo Banzi (Arduino) and Dario Buzzini (IDEO).
My role: form shaping, circuitry, Arduino programming.
Link: CIID Website
Today, a majority of people have reach an endless pool of music via various services such as Youtube, Spotify etc. However their interactions involved with consuming or sharing music on these platforms occur via screen based interfaces. Such interactions have a tendency to limit the capacities for self expressions and personalization. Circula was designed keeping in mind the goal to give the various interactions a tangible identity and elevate the scope of self expression.
Interactions with Circula
To Discover: Turn the knobs on the sides to tune and discover different tracks on the stream. Unique patterns are generated for every track, which can be seen through the top window.
To Save: To save a song to your playlist, grab a card and simply copy the pattern. Scribble down a personal note to remember the track.
To Play: Place the card you want to play onto the scanning tray and watch Circula automatically tune into your track.
How Circula works
The three knobs on the circula are connected to three individual potentiometer-motors that are connected to an Arduino board. By rotating the knobs, the user effectively turns the potentiometer that cycles through the various tracks.
The knobs are also attached to three circular visual indicators that are visible through the top window of the object. The patterns created by the the visual indicators can be copied down on a card.
For scanning capabilities, a camera is embedded the body, facing down. When a card with patterns is placed on the scanning tray, the device reads the card via computer vision that runs through Processing. The recognized song ID is is sent back to the potentiometer-motors that then turn to the correct positions and thus playing the song from the card.
