Human Loci

The starting point was the Musipple, an award-winning concept player that reinterprets the ritual of vinyl. We borrowed the ritual and changed what it means. Instead of selecting a song, you select an environment. Instead of showing a picture of a place, the object rebuilds its presence through a looping field recording and a surface you can feel.

That reframing decided everything downstream. Interaction is stripped to three broad, legible gestures: place a disk, move the arm to start, turn a wheel for volume. No menus, no labels, no screen. Without a disk the device stays silent even if the arm moves, so disk and gesture only mean something together. The experience stays in the foreground; the device recedes.

My core contribution was the electronics, built around one goal: placing a disk should automatically start the right soundscape. An RFID reader identifies each disk by a tag, a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 runs the state machine, and an audio module stores the recordings and drives the speakers. Disk detected: it plays. Disk removed: after a short threshold, it stops.

I validated the whole chain on the bench before committing to the build: reliable RFID polling, mapping each disk's tag to a track, audio control over a serial link, and the volume wheel mapped through the analog input. The firmware is modular, one piece reading tags, one routing them to tracks, one wrapping the audio commands, and a main loop holding the play-and-stop logic. A simple RFID module on a Pico turned the concept into a working system in a couple of hours, which is the part of electronics I still find quietly amazing.

The object is transparent on purpose; its construction is part of the experience. That left nowhere to hide a speaker or a cable, which made the audio enclosure the hardest integration problem. We designed a compact internal speaker module split into two sealed chambers, two small drivers each, prioritizing airtightness, rigidity, and an assembly that comes apart without glue.

We worked up to it in stages: an acrylic single-speaker mock-up to check vibration and the printed clamp, a wood prototype of the two-chamber layout to validate alignment and the assembly sequence, then the final laser-cut acrylic. The boards mount inside on printed supports screwed into heat-set inserts in the acrylic, so the outer surfaces stay clean. The engineering only counts when none of it shows.

The disks are the heart of the concept, so they could not be the usual digital-fabrication palette of light plastic or laser-cut wood. The team chose plaster for its weight and its stone-like presence, tinted and textured so each place has an identity you recognize by touch and color before any sound starts. Touch becomes a real dimension of the work, not a finish.

Making them was its own small engineering problem, solved by the team with a laser-cut positive, a vacuum-formed negative mould, and pigmented plaster poured and released. The same appetite for unfamiliar materials shaped the body's belt, a continuous live-hinge strip that lets rigid acrylic bend around the whole object while staying acoustically open. Most of the project's time went into trials like these, and the object is better for it.