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Sketchatune is my IxD graduate thesis developed in collaboration with Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor during my Visual and Multimedia Communication programme at IUAV (University of Venice). The wish to build Sketch a tune comes from my personal experience with the radio and in particular with a programme called Eclettica. Somehow it was so nice to understand how in a certain way a media becomes able to shape our behaviour, control our mood as well as  stimulate our imagination!

DEFINING THE PROJECT

Who is it for?

DJs as well as radio lovers.

What am I designing?

An interactive web site for a radio community. A sort of showcase of radio lovers emotions. An unrepeatable environment that combines music, graphic and speech all together. An everyday playlist as a common soundtrack to share. A music trend map through short visual notes. A composition of senses that comes from a daily podcast listening. Basically a fancy tool kit for listening to radio music.

What does it do for them?

The DJ will be able to know what his audience wants to hear, or at least predict trends and feelings. Finally radio lovers can share their emotions with each other and discover the importance of a personal medium like a DJ! The radio finds its power even among today’s amazing tech-stuff!

Function

The Sketch a tune project wants to encourage contacts within a radio community and, in order to do it, they have a common but untraditional space where there is the possibility of listening to the radio programme and doing something more at the same time. Just because this is the point: How do we listen to music? What we do during a radio programme? Where are all the listeners’ emotions going? How can we avoid the awful and anonymous list of podcast data in our computer folders? Is there still someone who believes in the role of the DJ as a filter of our listenings? So thanks to Sketch a tune each radio lover can manage an imaginative world full of feelings, a dynamic environment driven by fantasy, a digital space that allows different interactions: to play with words as well as images and shapes, and mix them with music and movements. The final landscape is a kind of snapshot that changes each time someone encloses a new “emotive tag” in it, like a kind of live media performance to be “looked” at! Sketch a tune is a gentle forecast data (different from scrobbling) useful to the DJ in order to get some feedback. It is not a simply a music aggregator because here the multiplicity coming from music becomes a singularity in connection with each radio lover!

SYSTEM DESIGN

Interface elements

The Sketch a tune website, an experimental interface for a radio community, was developed according to some important points:
- many to many broadcasting model
- avoid that awful podcast list or piles of folders spread on our computer screens as well as the common behaviour to a mechanical downloading of mp3
- dynamic simple “desktop-like” interface: dragging, scrolling and browsing data
- visualised radio experience: WYSIWYG-editor
- a customizable radio: personal user diary/common spaces to share with the all radio community
- social networking
- timed tags concept: posting comments and other kind of media at specific points within the radio segments
- experimental music player
- audio editing console for the DJ: podcast and streaming.

Links and downloads

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