No matter how you slice it, music is an experience. We make music to share an experience with other people, or to connect. We go to concerts because we can be with people that feel the same way we do about a certain song or a band. Human beings are social creatures, and we try to enhance ourselves through music. Social Music is the idea of pushing the social aspect of music by making it more interactive among users in a group setting. Google is moving this idea forward with their recent announcements at their 2012 I/O Development Conference.
There were a handful of exciting announcements (Android updates, Google + changes, and their new Galaxy Nexus tablet). One of the more unique devices they announced was the Google Nexus Q. Essentially this is a high-end media sharing sphere with a party-mode (capability for multiple android users to “throw” their songs over the air onto the device to play music). This is a pretty unique toy, and it should be for $300.
This device allows users to connect to a television and speakers for a power media experience. You can use it to stream music over the cloud, with multiple devices, and it will display a visualizer on the television to respond to the music. It has a powerful audio amplifier built directly into the device, so you will really get the most out of even a basic set of speakers. Everyone is a little unsure of how this will fit into the market for devices due to similarities to things like Apple TV and even Google’s own smart TV features, however the music capabilities are pretty exciting.
Google created a giant mockup of this device to really get the crowds involved, and it looked pretty exciting. They have 3 different devices set up around the Q so people can interact with it by moving the device and adjusting the mix of the song in real time. Users work together to control the height, rotation, and location of the sphere. What really interested me, was a behind-the-scenes YouTube video of the setup for the giant Q, and if you look closely you’ll notice that Ableton Live was used to handle the audio. Very cool!
This giant Nexus Q model was developed by the people over at Bot&dolly