SOUNDFLOW

A music-listening UI that lays out the broad context of music and allows annotation (2020)

It started from this: I find myself trying to remember certain sections, putting them in playlists, and sharing them with friends.
a common use-case for sharing music is wanting others to experience a  specific section / segment.

Explanatory prototype: Flagdrop lets you define segments of a song that you want to save, with a tag, into categories, and has a social feature.

User Research:

I prepared a survey for people to express in their own words their subjective experience of music listening.

    User research led me to insights I wasn’t well aware of and so I changed my design statement to focus broadly on listening to recorded music.

    There are layers of things people care about, some more dedicated listeners or musicians care about some of the technicalities of the instruments, or the production, or the story of the band, album, songs.

I also found out that not everyone cares to share music because not many people they know in real life tend to share their interests. So I pivoted from trying to make sharing certain segments a central feature, into making it just an option.

Precedent Studies:

    For digital interfaces I moved into deconstructing the features and compositions of the UI. Digital interfaces brought new things to the table, like the blue areas for example, which are to recommend similar music, or show the discography of the band, or just navigation in general. The yellow areas are just the music player or album art, the red are all descriptions or notes. Each website is good for a different thing, and in many things its generally okay to leave things de-centralized, but i think music interfaces can benefit from putting everything in one place, to reduce the effort involved from jumping from one thing to another

    The physical format I found to be important because it’s how people used to consume music before digital interfaces existed, so they were a chance for artists to couple the physical artefact with some booklet, with lyrics or information or imagery. The curation of a tangible experience shouldn’t be a lost art for music.

         Digital interfaces:


Physical/Tangible ‘interfaces’:

My analysis of project and discussion:

I find now that I was exploring many concepts in one, but they can be split into the following features or target users:

1 - When sharing music, its sometimes to highlight a certain snippet, not the entire song.

2 - A slightly more dedicated or advanced user is someone who is excited for a certain album release and wants to access some context surrounding the album, which is an experience that was lost when songs became digital / streamable.

3 - A specialized user here might be a musician, who is learning, or archiving his favorite riffs.

If I were to pursue any of these now, as a real project, I think the most feasible is 3. But #1 and #2 may be more impactful. #2 is a bigger scale effort since it would requires connecting many stakeholders for collecting and creating content for the artists, then databasing it and diplay it.