Synaesthetic Binaural Bassline Generator

Move fun that trying to create colour palettes, here is a sound palette creator. By using colours as the basis for sounds, this tool creates harmonic, and sometimes inharmonic basslines that modulate together to form a powerful binaural beat, and a series of grooving basslines.

A colour wheel is designed so that harmonic colour palettes can be easily found by placing the colours at set spacings around the wheel. The only real difference between sound and light is the speed and shape of the waveform, something that this instrument helps to bring back together. I was thinking of calling this kind of tool a synaesthesizer!

Sound Wheel

Instructions for use :

Double Click to add a new note and form a chord
Click anywhere black to remove a node (or right click)

Use the following keys to :
Z – Increase Intonation Range
X – Decrease Intonation Range
M – Change the next note’s Timbre
N – Change the next Timbre
UP – Move child chords closer to the centre
DOWN – Move child chords away from centre
LEFT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)
RIGHT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)

Open the Sound Wheel in a new window

Places talking about the SoundWheel :

• CNet
• Wired
• Think Design
• Elephant Candy

Turns dreams into music

Ever wondered how your dreams sound? Ever wondered what your dreams would sound like if they had soundtracks? Wonder no longer with the dreamCapturer.

A USB product that accurately predicts your mood in realtime, creating a mood-mapped soundtrack of your sleep from your first dream through to the last.

With musical backing from members of the Hallé and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, thousands of mood instilling sounds were compiled together to form a database of samples capable of recreating any mood or emotion. From anger to happiness through to more obscure emotions such as ambivalence and angst.

With a fully animated graphic user interface designed in Flash, the dreamCapturer analyses your mood and represents it onscreen with character driven feedback. If you are stressed and your mood is a mixture of anger and rage, the onscreen character snarls and dips his eyebrows, if you are calm and happy, the onscreen character smiles and nods. Of course this is all in time to the music!

How it Works

Connect the dream quilt sensor to your thumb and click the big blue button. Immediately your ‘baseline‘ mood is being analysed. Over the space of a few minutes of constant use, the dreamCapturer learns what your normal mood is and begins the music process. As soon as you are calibrated, the dreamCapturer gets to work every tenth of a second recognising alterations and trends in your mood and looking for relevant sounds in its audio database.

The database is categorised into four channels of audio each with its own specific emotional fingerprint :
the first channel is the percussion where pace and action are described;
the second channel hosts the classical instruments which bring major and minor emotions;
the third is the bass where fear and sensitivity are shaped;
the final channel holds melody sounds and masked audio such as pink noise.

Once the dreamCapturer begins interpreting your emotions, it harmonises the four channels with relevant sounds all set to the BPM set by the percussion channel. If you are having a nightmare, prepare to hear some uncomfortable sounds… of course happy dreams are relaxed and enjoyable late night listening.

Depending on many parameters measured from your body (and not your brain!) the dreamCapturer recognises when you are falling asleep, and when you are awake and does a pretty good job of figuring out how many dreams you had in between! When you log back onto your computer in the morning you can check your emails, and now you can check your dreams-inbox as they are stored in the dream vault.

Technical details

1. USB 2.0 hot pluggable.
2. Uses GSR (lie-detectors) and body temperature to determine mood.
3. Fully animated GUI programmed in Flash. Realtime character representation of mood.
4. Low latency mood capture with accurate mood determination algorithms.
5. Audio samples from bin-aural to classical from well respected musicians, scientists and artists.
6. Save your dreams, banish your nightmares or email them to your friends.

21st Century Tap dancing

Tap Dancing is finally coming back into style – thanks to the Beatbox Sneakers!

With Kick drums in your heels, snares under your toes and crash hats when you kick, every step becomes a sound.

With a whole arsenal of percussion located behind pressure sensors mounted around the shoes, click your heels together for a cow-bell, swivelling the ball of your foot scratches the sound…

these all-in-one drumkit shoes really do prove “you’re the greatest dancer”.

A Kettle for the Visually Impaired

A large proportion of the world has trouble seeing, or trouble moving. Boiling hot water, Mains electricity, Manual operation … Kettles are hardly the safest or easiest to use items. Enter the sense kettle. Self filling, self pouring, easy to operate and designed specifically for people who are blind.

As a self contained unit, the sense kettle never needs to be moved, fills itself when empty and has a large steady untippable footprint.

The deep groove guides the operation from boil to pour

Designed to be placed in corners of kitchen surfaces, the kettle can easily be located by feel alone along walls and its rough two-tone texture makes operation easy whilst remaining completely cold to the touch.

Operation is unique. There is a shut-line that separates the orange and white sections, a groove that starts at the top of the kettle and flows vertically down the face. If you put your finger in the groove and follow it down, the buttons interrupt your flow until they are pushed which forces them flush, continuing the groove onto the next button.

There are two buttons : Fill & Boil

Clicked at the start and thrust out once boiled to an audible alarm.

Pour

Insert your mug under the nozzle on the corner of the cube and pour.

The cup angles away from the user to prevent spillage

The tray is specially designed to tip the mug away from your body, so if you accidentally overfill, there will always be a safety gap at the top of your mug. A pressure sensor prevents pouring without a mug and all overflowed water is safely discarded.
One of the niftiest features is the glowing cube of water. As a product for the visually impaired, knowing the state of the device at all times is imperative, so there is always physical and audible feedback. The cube starts glowing blue and fades to red as the water boils.

Shown at home in the kitchen

This was a very simple idea but highly effective when demostrated. All in all, the Sense kettle is a quality of life enhancement device.

With a brief to extend how people interact with each other , determining how society communicates and interact using their mobile phones and improving on it. The Buddi is a privacy conscious social communicator, designed as a product concept for Nokia. Using a combination of Walkie Talkie, Geolocation and Pairing technologies, friends have never had it so easy and fun to talk and with the new concept of friend groups, it has never been easier to arrange a group meetup or hang out together on group video chat.

Concept

As the world is seemingly becoming smaller, with faster transport and communications becoming second nature, it is more important than ever for people to have solid, reliable and inexpensive means to stay in touch and arrange events. The Buddi Fone is a way for you and your network of contacts to communicate in new ways by knowing where you are and what relationship you have with your contacts. Once securely paired, the phone offers various ways to use it…

Three Modes of Operation :

1. Local

Works within 5 miles of your friends and offers free chatting using Walkie Talkie Technology. As each handset has an inbuilt GPS receiver, every Buddi Fone in your friends network shows up on as avatars surrounding you on a local map. In this mode, you can simply click someone for a free chat, or click multiple people for a group chat on the same radio band. As this is using public broadcast frequencies, all information and communication is open for anybody to join in or to broadcast their own signal. In ‘Repeater’ mode, the range of the network is increased by using each phone to re-broadcast the signal making it ideal for larger groups of friends as the range encloses a circumference five miles around all of your friends.

2. Regional

For more private conversations with people who live within your region, this mode allows you to see exactly where your friends currently are compared to you. Using inbuilt satellite maps and internet updated A-Z information, the Buddi shows you all of the best places to hang out, grab coffee and dance the night away. Using SMS to leave ‘conversations’ and ‘invitations’ with your group on the map, all of your friends receive the information as a pin on their map with your message below, along with directions on how to get there – click them to call them!

3. Global

Based on location and the type of handset you are calling, this mode allows you to call any person, anywhere in the world. By internally gauging the most appropriate method for the call, either regular GSM for mobile to mobile calls in your country, or VOIP and SIPS for calling people abroad. By knowing when your friends are at home, it can call their landline, rather than their mobile, and if the ring is not answered, the next number is tried.

Technology

Using a Piezo Electric Haptic Screen, which is both a high resolution display as well a touchscreen interface, the Buddi has an extremely simplistic interface which shows the user where to click on the screen depending on what they want to achieve. For example, clicking a contact avatar anywhere displays the “Contact Buddi” screen with options to call, send a message, start a conversation or add to a group chat. This type of contextual feedback means that the user has an intuitive grasp on what is achievable in each mode.

Underneath the screen are the fixed mode buttons, which press in and toggle, in a mutually exclusive way, offering the user access to the three main modes of operation. Below these is the hidden number pad which is a series of LED numbers that appear when needed to type numbers directly into the phone – this is discouraged for the user as it does not offer the full pairing of the devices to allow location data to be shared – but as there needs to be a way to call unimportant one time numbers (such as calling for a taxi), it is still important to include a traditional number interface.

To the side of the phone is a scroll wheel which apart from changing the volume of the call whilst speaking, allows for scrolling within texts and emails, zooming of video and offers a novel way to play games.

Behind the Nokia logo embedded in the screen is a forwards facing camera and loudspeaker to allow for video calling and saving recorded video messages to embed on your local map to share with your friends.

Security

As privacy is paramount in a system where location is given away, it was important to design in a physical way of joining your trusted network of friends. Each phone must be pressed against the face of another to form the “bond” that allows phones to discover one another. Once bonded each phone has an understanding of where it is and where everyone in your network is which shows up on your display as a local area map with all of your friends showing as pin points, with their current status.

Featured in the Design Directory 2003.