Active Listener: Glow Music Stick

Choose your emotion

There are moments when we actively want to hear certain sounds or music. One of the only ways music is still actively listened to today, is through concerts. Being at a concert venue encourages active listening because listening to music is the main reason why you are there. All other distractions are minimized.

These days concert-goers reach for glow sticks! Every enthusiast knows that a glow stick is an essential concert accessory, and there's no experience quite like waving a glow stick to music you love with thousands of other like-minded fans. The moment we hear a musician we love in concert, we sing along or cheer waving glow sticks to the rhythm of the music.

I believe this is a manifestation of the desire to actively participate in listening. Therefore, I thought about ways

to participate without disturbing music and context.

Emotion Model in Tonality

I designed an interface that uses a mobile phone’s gyroscope sensor that creates different Tonality, Timbre, Tempo, and Pitch according to their emotion whenever the arm swings. I designed it separating four simple emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and peacefulness, and applied musical elements corresponding to each emotion, so a musical rule could be applied based on a simple arm movement to create a musical loop.