MusicBottles

2001

Ali Mazalek
Dan Overholt
Zahra Kanji
Matthew Malcolm
James K. Alt
Jason Alonso
Jay Lee
Joanna Berzowska (PL)
Rich Fletcher
Seungho Choo
Joseph Paradiso (US)
Charlie Cano
Colin Bulthaup

Hiroshi Ishii (US) (JP)
Tangible Media Group

Three sets of bottles filled with jazz, techno and classical music explore the transparency of the interface. Glass bottles as containers and controllers of digital information accessed by opening and closing the lids. The project tries to create emotional value different from conventional function-centric interfaces.

Through the seamless extension of physical affordances and the metaphor of bottles, this project explores interface transparency. Just as we naturally open and close lids to access bottles' physical contents, in this project users open and close lids to access digital information. A wide variety of contents (including music, weather reports, and stories) have been developed to test the concept.

The "bottle-as-interface" concept began as a "weather forecast bottle," which Ishii envisioned as a present for his mother. Upon opening the weather bottle, she would be greeted by the sound of singing birds if the next day's weather was forecasted to be clear. On the other hand, the sound of rainfall would indicate impending rain. Such an interface would be consistent with her everyday interactions with her familiar, physical environment, such as opening a bottle of soy sauce. She had never clicked a mouse or typed a URL in her life, but had opened soy sauce bottles thousands of times.

In late 1998, Ishii and Rich Fletcher expanded this idea into "MusicBottles" and began the project. They used sensor technology developed by Dr. Joe Paradiso and collaborated with different designers, engineers and artists to create a custom table and bottles with special electromagnetic tags. Three sets of bottles—each with different content: classical, jazz, and techno music—were designed and built.

In June 2000, this project received the IDEA 2000 Silver Prize (International 2000 Industrial Design Excellence Awards competition).

For this project, a custom wireless sensing technology was developed. An antenna coil attached to the underside of the table creates a magnetic field above the table. A custom electronic circuit detects disturbances in this magnetic field that are caused by the placement and opening of tagged bottles. The system then executes musical programs for each bottle (e.g. opening one bottle plays a piano) and controls the patterns of colored LED light projected onto the table. This project uses a combination of artistic and technological techniques to support emotional interactions that are fundamentally different from conventional, function-centric interfaces.