Sound & Color
Sound & Color
Sound & Color is an app I ideated in school, it is a music app connected with synesthesia where music and colors correlate.
Problem assumption
Doing some research I found that there were too many click-throughs on pre-made curated playlists that pertain to mood creation or one user’s listening habits, thus inhibiting the experience.
User Interviews
I interviewed 3 girls and 3 boys due to time constraints, and affinity mapped out all the data that I had collected. Too many click-throughs on pre-made curated playlists that pertain to mood creation or one user’s listening habits, thus inhibiting experience.
Research
From my research, I yielded information from one of my interviewers about Synesthesia. Synesthesia is a brain function in which one sense is perceived by another sense as well. Ex: When you hear music you see or associate a color with it. After doing some Internet research I found that UC Berkeley conducted a study on this.
UC Berkeley staff scientist Stephen palmer conducted a study by interviewing 100 people from both the United States and Mexico. There was a 98 percent accuracy across the board of interviewees who all chose the same colors when playing particular songs and or notes off of a color spectrum of 37 shades. They also recorded their emotional scale. Essentially this tells us that we all have the same general emotional wireframing regardless of culture or how we grew up. From this research, I defined my goal for this app.
Goal
To refine and amplify the music experience through curation of color and emotions.
Design Iteration and Testing
Through doin a design studio, user testing, and iteration on a very simple two-step process guides the app.
First, you can choose up to three genres of music that you would like to listen to.
Second, you choose a color. Eventually, you will be able to choose multiple colors, as many synesthetes see me more than one color in a song.
Then a playlist is generated with songs that correlate with the genre and color selection.
