Korus PX-1
A Physical Bridge Between Mood and Music
“How can emotion become a tangible input for music discovery?”
Role
Interaction Designer
Timeline
5 Weeks
Team
Riddhima Bansal
Soumyadeep Roy
Simone Joshi
Opportunity
Digital listening has become effortless—but emotionless. Streaming platforms make discovery passive and impersonal.
Korus PX-1 explores how a tangible interface can reconnect listeners to music through color, touch, and mood.
Concept Overview
Korus PX-1 is a tangible music interface that converts emotion into curated playlists.
Each disc represents a mood. When inserted, the device reads the disc, senses its parameters, and generates a playlist through Spotify’s API.
The experience bridges physical interaction and digital intelligence, bringing life and a sense of connection back into everyday listening.
Design Principle
Emotions are complex and layered. Korus PX-1 captures them through color, rotation, and tactile feedback.
Each action from inserting a disc, turning the dial, adjusting a slider will produce visual and physical responses that make music selection intuitive, tactile and intimate.
System Flow
Each disc carries a unique identifier read by the PX-1 sensor array.
The system translates these values into parameters such as genre, tempo, and entropy.
The companion app receives this data, generating a playlist through Spotify’s recommendation engine.
Physical Interactions
Each action on Korus PX-1 turns emotion into data. The discs represent moods, the dial selects genre, and the sliders refine tempo and energy. Together, they translate how you feel into the music you want to hear.
Users begin by placing up to three mood discs on the console. Each disc represents an emotion, detected through embedded RFID sensors that gets read by the device.
The LCD displays the user’s top five genres. Rotating the haptic dial scrolls through them, and pausing briefly selects a genre for the playlist.
Two sliders refine the playlist. The tempo slider (40–180 BPM) adjusts speed, while the entropy slider (1–100%) controls how familiar or exploratory the tracks are.
Pressing PLAY sends the detected moods, genre, and slider data to Spotify, which combines them with the user’s history to create a personalized playlist.
Our Prototype
The prototype is a fully functional MVP that brings Korus PX-1 from concept to reality.
It was designed, fabricated, and assembled in-house using 3D-printed parts and laser-cut acrylic. The mood discs are tinted acrylic and scanned via color detection sensors connected to an Arduino-based control system.
The prototype demonstrates the complete interaction — from reading emotion-coded discs to generating playlists through Spotify’s API — validating both the concept and its technical feasibility.
Companion App
The PX-1 app mirrors the device experience in a digital space, extending control, feedback, and personalization beyond the console.
The home screen mirrors the PX-1 console in real time, showing active mood discs and system inputs.
As the user adjusts the device, the interface updates genre, tempo, and playlist data instantly, creating a continuous bridge between touch and sound.
Here are a few more ways the home-screen might appear depending on the context.
The Explore tab functions as the user’s personal library — a space to revisit their musical moods, saved playlists, and new disc drops.
Each session from PX-1 is logged as a playable moment, showing the most-used discs, longest listening streaks, and shared stats.
Users can expand their collection with new emotion discs, each unlocking fresh sonic palettes and extending the Korus ecosystem.
The control panel for PX-1. It shows connection status, the discs currently in use, and the five genres synced to the device.
From here you can browse your full disc library, assign or remove discs, and edit which genres are pushed to the dial. All changes update in real time while paired.
Each disc carries its own mood, personality, and sound identity. The Disc Info screen lets users explore these nuances — from emotional tone to musical traits — and use them to shape playlists.
With Find the Groove, a user can choose a single song or artist as inspiration. Korus then analyses its tempo, energy, and emotion to build an entirely new mix that resonates with the same feeling. It’s a way to turn a moment, or a mood, into music.
Reflection
Korus PX-1 rethinks music discovery as a personal, sensory experience.
It connects physical interaction with digital intelligence, showing how emotion can be an active part of technology — not an afterthought.
Explore the research & insights that drove this project.