Beyond the Play Button - My SXSW Proposal
It is SXSW Panel Picker season. I've submitted a talk to both SXSW Interactive and SXSW Music. The talk is called 'Beyond the Play Button - the Future of Listening' - the goal of the talk is to explore new interfaces for music listening, discovery and interaction. I'll show a bunch of my hacks and some nifty stuff I've been building in the lab. Here's the illustrated abstract: 35 years after the first Sony Walkman shipped, today's music player still has essentially the same set of controls as that original portable music player. Even though today's music player might have a million times more music than the cassette player, the interface to all of that music has changed very little.
In this talk we'll explore new ways that a music listener can interact with their music. First we will explore the near future where your music player knows so much about you, your music taste and your current context that it plays the right music for you all the time. No UI is needed.
Next, we'll explore a future where music listening is no longer a passive experience. Instead of just pressing the play button and passively listening you will be able to jump in and interact with the music. Make your favorite song last forever, add your favorite drummer to that Adele track or unleash your inner Skrillex and take total control of your favorite track.
If this talk looks interesting to you (and if you are a regular reader of my blog, it probably is), and you are going to SXSW, consider voting for the talk via the SXSW Panel Picker: