We love listening to records, but all of that sound system equipment sitting out on the shelf is not exactly pretty. Designer Roy Harpaz came up with a record player design that not only sounds great, but also looks like a piece of modern art.

The vertical record player is egg-shaped with a front made of CNC-cut walnut wood. Inside, very modern components give your prized records the very best treatment. The TOC can play even old and warped records which would ordinarily be unplayable thanks to spherical ball bearings that let the record spin freely.

The front of the player has touchscreen controls, but you can also control playback using the matching remote control. Unlike old record players, the TOC even lets you skip between songs thanks to a special sensor that reads the grooves to find out where the next song begins.

Buttons on the side let you choose between three record sizes and three rotation speeds. The player features standards speaker outputs as well as two USB inputs so you can play your favorite music right from a flash drive, smartphone, or laptop. The TOC is a concept, not a consumer product, but we’ll still be hoping to see it on our shelves sometime in the future.

The post Sexy Sculptural Record Player Combines Analog + Futurism first appeared on Gajitz.

Interaction between humans and their machines is understandably cold and one-sided – but what if your gadgets knew how you were feeling and responded appropriately? A music player designed by Joe Smith, Yeawon Choi, Yifei Chai, and Yuchang Chow called Rapport seeks to establish a more emotional connection between humans and machines.

Rapport is a music player with the ability to read your emotions and play music based on how you feel and react. It begins when you make “eye” contact with the player, which looks like a periscope with its bottom stuck in a wood block. The Rapport leans forward to analyze your facial expression, then chooses a song that it deems appropriate for your mood and the time of day.

The song begins to play at a low volume. If you display a positive reaction, such as a smile, the Rapport player increases the volume. If you express a negative reaction, the player switches to another song. And if you express surprise, the player recoils and returns to the setting it was on before it detected surprise.

The project is an attempt to personalize our technology, to give us a deeper connection with the items we use every day. Although the exterior design is simple, the inner workings are complex. The Rapport includes a webcam, a computer, motors and cables. The device uses complex software to recognize and respond to facial expressions. The team behind the intriguing project say the technology could be used in an educational setting to recognize anxiety and help deliver encouragement to students.

The post Feeling the Music: Gadget Reads Emotions to Choose Songs first appeared on Gajitz.

As great as it is to carry music around all of the time, there are some design elements to the standard MP3 player design that could be improved on. Designer Jeongbeom Han tackled this challenge by designing an MP3 player that is as lovely as it is functional.

Han’s “Shuffle” MP3 player concept does away with the tangle-prone cords usually connected to ear buds. Instead of hard plastic pieces at the end of cables, the ear buds are made of flexible silicone that doesn’t tangle. The part that fits into the ear is soft and pliable, allowing them to stay in the ear painlessly.

The body of the player and the ear buds are all one piece, and according to the designer the player features an easy-to-use user interface. This uniquely designed MP3 player doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel – just make it a little more attractive.

The post Toss the Tangles: Stylish MP3 Player With Built-In Ear Buds first appeared on Gajitz.

Although portable music players seem like a rather recent invention, they have existed in some form for hundreds of years. The one above was built in 1890 by famed Parisian automaton maker Blaise Bontems. It faithfully reproduces the sound of a bird singing beautifully via a complex series of moving parts. It was restored by Michael Start of The House of Automata.

The sounds created by this 120 year old gadget are surprisingly realistic. The bellows, gears and springs all work together to make a song that is lovely and sounds just like a live bird. The electronics of today might be able to record actual birdsong and play it back, but they can’t invent sounds from intricate moving parts like this antique. And in our humble estimation, those invented sounds are far more compelling than the reproduced ones.

The post 19th Century Device Recreates Birdsong in Stunning Detail first appeared on Gajitz.

Creating music is easier than ever now thanks to the availability of digital music tools. Most of those tools, however, require at least some training or specialized knowledge before you can start making music. Not so with the Dyskograf, an art installation that creates music with nothing more than the markings from a felt tip pen.

Invented by art collective Avoka, the Dyskograf is primarily a graphical disk drive that translates drawings into music. Using a camera mounted on an arm, the graphical disk drive translates markings on a paper “record” into rudimentary music sounds. The more marks the user adds, the more layers of sound are piled onto the new song.

The interface allows for a unique physical connection with music, something that is in short supply in the era of digitized, hands-off music.

This unusual method of composing music allows for mistakes, coincidences and surprises. In this way, it is quite different from the traditional paper-and-pencil method yet also far removed from the digital composing and editing used by many modern musicians. It is at once a throwback to a more physical time, an homage to the digital world, and a brand new musical creation medium unto itself.

The post Interactive Turntable Makes Beats + Songs From Drawings first appeared on Gajitz.