Songcord

Music decorates time and space, but modern ways of consumption have reduced it to mere background noise. Songcord helps restore personal connection with music.

Transforming music into a tangible, personal form in portable listening experience.

Duration:
14 Weeks, Fall 2024

Course:
Senior Product Studio

Soul Searching
Prototyping
Solidworks, Blender

Songcord plays music through a string of beads encoded with songs.

Story

My mom used to own casette players. She told me there was a time when music was harder to access, yet it felt more intimate and personal.

I spent 57,752 minutes on Spotify last year, often listening to music out of habit, even when I didn’t need to. This made me question how I engage with music today.

In a world of instant access, how can we reconnect with music more deeply?

Development

Ideation

Music you can wear and play through a string, making playlists feel finite and real—something you can touch, live with, stain, lose, or give away.

Form-giving

Designed to be worn openly, not hidden away—highlighting the beads while standing out as a bold statement piece.

Product detail

Like a grand piano, it opens up to reveal its inner workings, bringing the listener closer to how the music is produced.

Product refinement

Physical models to determine scale, details, and arrange internal components into logical position.

Material & Finish

Aluminum for strength, with heat-bent plywood and cherry to capture the warmth of an instrument.

Product

Giving tangiblity to sound and time

As music flows, the cord unwinds and gets exposed to the elements, reflecting the passage of time

Make, wear, and share

Songcord invites you to curate and put care in your own soundtrack, reclaiming a sense of ownership that we once lost.

Personal and transparent
The cover that unfolds to reveal its inner workings—bringing you closer to the production of music.

How it works
Pulling the knob unlocks the cover, allowing it to slide open. The camera module inside then scans and decodes the beads into playlists stored in online.

Encoding the music

After creating a playlist, scan the beads with your phone or manually input the bead color sequence on a desktop to upload the playlist online.

Accessing the music

Once the cord is scanned, the playlist is accessible to anyone through that specific cord color sequence.