De:coded

From Music Hack Day

De:coded is a design hack by | Dave McKinney from | Discovr. Made in 24 hours as part of Music Hack Day Sydney.

Decoded is a tribute to a West African music artist called Fela Kuti. The goal was to get away from the digital screen and make something that you could touch and feel. Data from several music APIs were converted back into analog form by making turntables, iPads, iPhones and a laptop out of paper, steel, foam, and cardboard. Many of the materials used were collected from a Sydney recycling junkyard the previous day.

Converting digital to analog: the turntables are connected to each other based on the "musical similarity" between each record (based on similarity data from the Echo Nest API). This makes a music graph, with the vinyl being the nodes. Various bits of metadata are printed onto the iOS devices including colour images (from the Last.fm API), and raw JSON for lyrics (Musixmatch API) and the artist biography (Rovi API).

Macbook Pro, made with folded white foamboard for the body, and a quick Photoshop design printed on paper to make the black screen and text, all using a $40 colour printer. The turntables, iPhones and iPads were constructed in the same way (real devices were measured, then cut out, glued together, folded up to make each shape, and then images or code printed out and stuck on top).

For analog music playback there is a sewing needle attached to a paper cone, so you can hear some scratchy, warping, distorted Fela.

Getting the turntable playback speed and needle angle correct is like climbing Mt Everest.