My Cassettes

A clever new device! from Neil101

I have been reviewing the contributed images in the My Cassettes flickr group (now over 100 members strong!) as I am in the final stages of completing this research. The defense date has actually been set for April 4th!. yikes!... There has been alot of data to sift through, over 400 images in fact, so I am sure glad I used del.icio.us to bookmark and annotate everything as I went along. It was particularly useful when I was contacting the shortlist of participants and the approvals form my informed consent process were coming in. I would just tag the entries accordingly, and can now sort (for instance) on all the properties of my data that can be published in the final document. More than 70 images out of 113 requests, of which I am very pleased. A big THANKS going out to all the participants =) People were amazingly responsive and interested in this research and I expect a good turn out for the upcoming survey as well.

I have updated this blogs sidebar to provide easier access to the data, and will also be updating the feed shortly. Although you will not need to re-subscribe, It will probably blow away all the old dates of posts and such in your reader... so sorry about that.

And now, for an update on the writing. This thesis documents the affordances of physical musical artifacts, specifically tape cassettes. It is primarily concerned with new ways of understanding these affordances, how people organize and use these artifacts. The author (moi) hopes to inform the design of better interfaces for listening to digital music, specifically the mp3. The image above is a brilliant visual mashup, and represents for me something that is at the core of my work. How do we get the best of both worlds when we are listening to our music. When is it better to have a physical object, or will it ever be again? As tapes are quickly fading in to media history, have we thrown the baby out with the bath water now that we are all consuming "iMusic"?

( I wont be writing like this in the thesis btw, just sketching some of the ideas as I put that beast together)

Labels: ipod, music, research, tags, tapes