My master's thesis asked one question: what if listening to music alone could feel like being on a dance floor?
I spent months interviewing people about specific moments. The stranger you dance near without speaking. Heartbeats syncing with the bass. The second you look up and the whole room is feeling the same thing.
These moments have specific behaviours: presence without interruption, synchrony without announcement, proximity without exchange. I was looking for the digital equivalent.
Six prototypes came out of it. Each started not from a feature but from a specific felt moment. Exhibited as interactive prototypes in 2024.
Presence Pulse
You are never alone in a song. Somewhere, someone is 47 seconds ahead of you. Another is replaying the bridge for the third time. Presence Pulse makes that felt: a quiet visual pulse that grows as more people enter the same track, without a number, without a list. Presence without notification.
Song Reactions
Explicit reactions (thumbs, hearts, fire) reduce music to opinion. Song Reactions removes the meta layer: your response to a track becomes the track itself. You send a song back. The music does the speaking.
Heartbeat Sync
The physical experience of a dancefloor is partly haptic. Your pulse adjusts to the room. Heartbeat Sync reads your heart rate through the phone and surfaces a quiet indicator when it aligns with the tempo of what you are listening to. You feel it before you notice it.
Music Soulmate
Algorithmic similarity usually surfaces music you already know. Music Soulmate inverts that: it finds the one person on the platform whose listening history mirrors yours most closely, without revealing who they are. A connection without a profile.
Digital Dancefloor
Everyone listening to the same track right now, rendered as a shared space. It works like a room. You arrive, you are placed, you are among people, and then the song ends and it disperses. No record of who was there.
A sixth prototype cannot be named. Spotify took it on for internal development.
Read the thesis