A one week project involving 54 students from Hyper Island a freak machine that turns music into taste and produces Swedish meatballs with flavors of your favorite music.
Engineering, coding, carpentry and design
A one week project involving 54 students from Hyper Island a freak machine that turns music into taste and produces Swedish meatballs with flavors of your favorite music.
Engineer, Industrial designer
Hyper Island, Stockholm
Tomas Mazetti
September 2014
“Use the entire class of 54 interactive art directors to create something, anything, in two weeks to go viral.”
The idea generating process consisted of several iterations where the whole class was separated into 10 groups to ideate and then present their ideas to the rest of the teams. Exhaustive debates of the potential ideas were held, and they were evaluated using two main values related to the task virality and originality.
From almost 20 good ideas we chose one relationship food and music. This relationship has endured the passage of time across many cultures. They are historical complements and partners, from the kitchen to the dining room. Through a combination of programming, design, and a legal amount of madness, we developed code that converts music into taste. For the first time in history anyone could find out how ”Gangnam Style”, ”Bohemian Rhapsody” and ”Beat It” taste.
Behind the scenes of shooting a teaser
I was working in the group which was responsible for creating a freak machine out of junk materials and some leftovers. It was designed from scratch starting with sketches and involved creating engineering components to make every part of the machine move as we wanted.
At the core of the Beatballs there is software that analyses sounds with the help of The Echo Nest algorithms and translates the results into different flavours. It basically makes meatball recipes out of music. Then the machine, powered by two Arduinos, mixed certain amounts of ingredients and cooked a meatball out of them. Voilà a tasty meatball!
A creation of the freak machine
It was really hard to work in such a big group. At the beginning even the smallest and trivial discussions switched into irrelevant and energy-draining conversations. We spent almost half of the week looking for the right aproach and tools to use in order to come to a consensus.
At some point we decided to split up into several subgroups, each of which worked on a particular part of the project. There were representatives from each department who had their own meetings where they shared statuses and information between subgroups.
As a wrap up each group created an energy diagram of the project and shared their reflections on the process with each other.
The project hosted over 10 000 unique visitors within two weeks and about 5000 unique recipes were generated during that time. A week after the launch, the Beatballs was aired on BBC Radio, mentioned in several media outlets such as Engadget, Resumé, PSFK, The Creators Project and Brainstorm9. We received a huge wave of mentions on Twitter from well-known people and meatball lovers around the world.
BBC World Service. October 14, 2014
PSFK. September 5, 2014
Hackaday. September 6, 2014
The Creators Project. September 8, 2014
Trendhunter. September 11, 2014
OZY. September 24, 2014
W+K Amsterdam. October 3, 2014
WGSN. October 2, 2014
FinalCult. September, 2014
Smash. September 8, 2014
Resumés. September 3, 2014
Tjock. September 4, 2014
99mac. September 5, 2014
Yemek. September 10, 2014
Nöjesguiden. September 16, 2014
A Swedish Fruit Salad. September 3, 2014
Retecool. September 10, 2014
Nordik Simit. December 11, 2014
Engadget Deutschland. September 15, 2014
Das Filter. September 8, 2014
Brainstorm9. September 9, 2014
LifeBoxSet. September 5, 2014
K'conf. September 6, 2014
Pouch. September 22, 2014
Yemek. September 10, 2014
Essence of Life. October 28, 2014014