SoundMotion: A streamlined way of companionship designed for long-distance couples.

The Opportunity

Long-distance couples have no shortage of ways to exchange information, yet text messages and video calls still demand direct attention. The quieter cues through which intimacy is maintained—presence, mood, care, and shared routines—are much harder to carry across distance.

Rather than reproducing face-to-face communication, this project asks how an everyday music product might support a lighter form of companionship: one that can remain in the background, become explicit when desired, and fit around two different schedules.

Researching Music as a Channel for Intimacy

To understand how music-sharing changes across relationships, I first conducted a one-hour role-playing workshop with eight participants from four countries. It identified feedback, relationship context, and tangibility as key factors, and pointed toward romantic relationships as the most emotionally meaningful context. I then conducted five semi-structured interviews to explore how couples use music across distance. The material was transcribed, coded, and clustered through thematic analysis.

The detailed research process is available here.

Brainstorm

Guided by these principles, I explored three directions: extending an existing music device with physical behaviors, creating a portable connector for phone-based sharing, and designing a fixed shared speaker that could live in each partner's space. The sketches focused on how form, motion, and touch could move naturally between peripheral awareness and explicit engagement—not on styling alone.

Why a Shared Ambient Speaker

Unlike a phone accessory, a paired desktop product could become a persistent point of connection and a shared listening ritual across both homes. Its stationary presence made subtle motion readable from the edge of attention, while reciprocal states and the familiar speaker archetype gave the Couple Channel a clear emotional and everyday purpose. I accepted the additional technical complexity because the central research question concerned the quality of tangible companionship—not portability.

Initial Concept

The selected direction became a pair of connected desktop speakers integrated with Spotify. Each device could work independently or enter the Couple Channel for synchronized listening. The product therefore had three roles: a speaker, a tangible switch for entering and leaving the shared channel, and an ambient interface for presence and emotional feedback.

Swinging was developed as the central motion cue. Inspired by the oscillation of a bell, it became an interaction primitive rather than a literal form metaphor: a gentle swing could signal that a partner was online or had reached out. Because different schedules can make connection feel demanding, the hat also became a deliberate physical control, allowing each person to choose when to move between private listening and shared engagement.

Interaction Iteration

Following a low-fi prototype test and quick evaluation, it became apparent that placing the screen at the bottom of the main body design might conflict with users' expectations, thereby increasing their cognitive load. Consequently, the final design solution opted to position the screen in a more intuitively visible location. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from cuteness and personification: the design aimed to strengthen the sense of companionship between partners through the tangible product and anthropomorphism.

Final Design

SoundMotion was specifically developed as a communication system aimed at facilitating seamless interaction between long-distance couples by combining synchronized music listening and physical engagement. Each couple is equipped with a dedicated device known as SoundMotion, which enables music playback and basic physical interactions. This device is seamlessly integrated with the user's individual Spotify account, allowing them to access personalized music feeds and communication data provided by the Spotify server.

Tangible interaction design

In contrast to conveying explicit information through text messages and social media, this form of physical interaction subtly conveys the state of one partner and provides ambiguous cues of longing and care. Instead of forcefully interrupting the user's current activities with intrusive notifications, it naturally captures attention when the user chooses to engage. Users have the freedom to switch between subtle, peripheral interactions and explicit, visible interactions through physical gestures.

Prototyping iteration for user test

Initially, I chose to use an electromagnet as the main driving component. I installed the electromagnet on the inner wall of the SoundMotion device and attached a magnet to the inner wall of the hat, as shown in the circuit diagram. However, during the actual experimentation process, I found that the electromagnet I purchased, which operates at 6-12V, had a limited magnetic field range and was unable to effectively attract and repel the magnet on the hat.

Consequently, I opted for the second solution, which involves using a servo motor to drive the swinging motion of the hat. I connected a 5V motor to the ESP8266 and used Blinker to control the motor's amplitude range, frequency, and duration of rotation.

Interaction logic map of the SoundMotion system

SoundMotion utilizes the ESP8266 as its hardware platform to control the product's hardware and establish a connection with the Spotify server. This enables the transfer of emoji feedback data generated during user interaction, allowing Spotify to analyze the data using the Spotify Web API and provide personalized music recommendations for couples.

Concept video & Storyboard

Scenario