We all have a photo album full of old memories, hidden somewhere in our house. How come we are so used to saving our visual memories but have very little regard for our auditory recognition? This interest formed the base for the Sentimental Audio Memories project by Professor David Frohlich of the University of Surrey. In this project a mobile recorder was developed together with a ‘radio-style’ playback device. The recorder is small and can only record snippets of 10 second audio. Over time users built up a collection of audio snippets with time-stamps, that can be imported to the SAM-player. This device plays continious loops of audio snippets, filtered by 4 main categories (voices, nature, human & objects) in chronologic order. A big round button rotates in sync with the playback and can be rotated to jump through time.

For this project we were asked to combine several separately developed parts of the project. This included the implementation of the categorising algorithm, redesign of the embedded electronics and software of the player, and implementing the overal interaction scenarios.