Change the tune – hacking a common office issue

A common issue when you play music loud in a shared environment is that you will inevitably play songs that someone in the room hates. In the past this was less of an issue as changing the tape or CD was quite a task. Nowadays we have millions of songs to choose from and – of course – also have a much higher chance to miss the taste of your colleagues.

Agency republic in London chose to tackle this issue in an R&D project by putting up a poster in the office that says “change the tune” and when you hit it with a piece of paper (or other things handy) an Arduino powered simple piece of hardware in the poster changes the tune on Spotify.

We have a shared music machine in our studio. Anyone can put anything on they want at any time, no rules. It’s a democratic system that seems to work 99% of the time. But occasionally the system fails and that’s what inspired me to build this poster. Built as an R&D project at agencyrepublic.com

Check the video on Spotify:

Now Michael Robinson needs to release the code, Muahahaha!