UXculture

A Piano In Your Pocket

While the piano represents an incredibly versatile instrument, it's not a great choice if you hope to entertain friends around the campfire. No, in that case, you would be better off with the guitar or perhaps the harmonica. But that may soon change, thanks to the new Hand Roll Piano from Japan:

It unfurls to 61 keys, runs on batteries, and includes an onboard speaker. And it rolls back up to a size small enough to fit into a beer can.

The roll-out keyboard is not exactly Steinway-worthy; it's not touch-sensitive or pressure-sensitive. Yet. But that's bound to come next. And it's equipped with a MIDI interface to connect directly to your PC.

In theory, you should now be able to sit in Starbucks with your Hand Roll piano, your laptop, your Wi-Fi connection, and your grande latte, and stream your virtuoso performances across the globe in real time. Yes, those years of practicing Hannon scales up and down the ivories are about to pay off.

The Networked Record Collection

A friend recently decided to melt his CD-collection (about 500 discs) down into MP3s through iMusic and his iPod. He then liquidated the CDs themselves (selling all he could to a used CD shop and donating the rest.) To enhance his user experience, he captured all of the CD cover images and loaded them into the iPod as well. As a personal data backup and recovery plan, he then burned all the MP3s onto 7 DVDs and stored them off-site (ie, a location other than his apartment.)

I must say, there is something admirably lean, weightless, efficient, portable about his new music collection, storage, and consumption strategy. I admire it even as I remain old-school. I still feel attached to objects. I still have a sizable LP collection alongside my atom-based CDs.

Yet I wonder if even a "collection" as lean as my friend's may soon be outmoded. In the future, will we all simply subscribe to massive network-based music collections (bigger than Napster or iMusic), save our preferences and lists in the database, and tap into the network anywhere, on demand? In such a scenario, what is a collection, really? No need to have a personal cache of hoarded music, when you can dynamically access any song at any time.

Sure, your collection plays a social role as well. No problem: with the networked music collection, you can opt to make a list public and share it with friends, family, and strangers. You can find like-minded  music listmakers. And you can even enhance your P2P (peer to peer) social capital as a tastemaker through the magic of peercasting.

Comparing the home-based present to the network-based future, why hoard and store when you can click and share in an atsmosphere of (rented) digital abundance? Of course, the user experience of putting on a vinyl platter, holding a big piece of album art in your hands, and watching the needle travel across the grooved landscape offers many joys. After all, new technologies don't always uninvent their predecessors. Instead, sometimes technology stacks up.