Design Process

Currently, people’s music streaming histories accumulate into vast digital archives, yet these archives remain largely inaccessible or seldom shared in meaningful ways with others. How might shared reflection and social connection be supported through new ways of exploring and co-listening to this collective listening history? Queue Player is a tangible music player that lets groups of close friends navigate their combined archives by tapping a tempo, synchronizing playback across distance and revealing music from their pasts in ways that foster anticipation, intimacy, and moments of social bonding.

We integrated a piezoelectric vibration sensor, LED strips, and an audio board with a Raspberry Pi to enable Queue Player’s tap detection, song queue, tempo feedback, and synchronized audio output.

Queue Player’s materials comprised of CNC-milled maple wood for a wooden base and top, resin and 3D printed inserts, laser cut frosted acrylic, and a clear acrylic tube. The long-lasting qualities of these materials helped to construct a robust and high-quality product.

Interaction Design

By tapping a steady tempo on the top of their Queue Players device, users can navigate to different parts of their collective song archive, surfacing tracks that match the tempo they set. This approach allows listening across time—out of chronological order—creating an ongoing, evolving experience of discovery and reflection.

Long-Term Queue Player Field Study

Study Goals

We aimed to ① Consider how participants might use Queue Player as an extension of –not replacement for—their individual and social listening habits as well as ② Understand how Queue Player might mediate social connection with close-knit groups over distance, through synchronicity and tangibility.

Research Process

We hand crafted a small batch of 4 Queue Player research products and put them into the separate households of 4 close friends for 6 weeks. The combined archive spanned up to a decade of digital music listening history across users and contained 66,270 unique songs.

Outcomes & Implications

We designed Queue Player to explore how a close-knit social group could collectively explore their music listening histories through a unique tangible device. By materializing these digital archives, Queue Player offers new ways of navigating not only songs listened to in the past but the experiences, emotions, and memories tied to them. Tempo was used as a way to gradually reveal songs, allowing users to re-experience their music beyond conventional filtering methods like by genre or artist. Queue Player encourages focused attention on both one’s own and others’ listening histories, supporting reflection, anticipation, and shared discovery as the song queue unfolds. This research demonstrates how making digital music histories materially present in daily life can foster reflection on the past and, when combined with others’ data, promote social bonding and intimacy. It also contributes another step toward understanding how the slow technology philosophy can be extended and advanced in design practice and field research.