I realized today that there isn’t enough explanation on my blog about why I worked on kokoro. It began as an idea of how to make digital devices “smarter” and find new inputs that relate to our bodies and can control digital devices. Music players are one of the most common interactions we have with digital files and sometimes having to take conscious choices by looking at a screen is just not very practical. One of the best indicators of the state of our bodies is heart rate so that is what I decided to use.

There are other attempts at interfacing with music in different ways. Most of the examples I can thing of are software, like the genius feature on iTunes. A prototype I found interesting is ColorSonic, that relates music to color. But I continued to look for a way to do this without needing our attention, to make it an almost magical thing, that our iPod can just choose the music that is well suited for this particular moment.