Road Echoes

Road Echoes interactively links music to locations, allowing you to relive experiences.

The driving experience of a road trip is often forgotten. Road Echoes allows you to be able to relive those moments, as it is a core part of the road trip experience.

Road Echoes aims to capture the essence of a road trip by linking music to locations. Using Spotify and Google Maps data, Road Echoes records the music played during your road trip and stores this on a 3D terrain disc. This interactive disc can be placed on a music player. This will play music associated with each location. Between songs, an AI narrator provides interesting information about the surroundings at the time you previously listened to that song, such as details about an upcoming town and personal anecdotes.

Road Echoes stimulates reminiscence by linking music, narration, and location, allowing you to relive your road trip memories in a unique way. This approach addresses the lack of a distinct material form for location history and explores how location data can support reminiscence.

This prototype aims to show that making location history data more interactive can help you relive the road trip experience.

Road Echoes materializes personal data for reflective exploration

Road Echoes contributes to the research how alternative
forms of personal data can aid people in exploring their life from different
perspectives over time by exploring ways to make location history data
more materially present and interactive, potentially unlocking new
possibilities for reflection and exploration of past visited places. Digital
location history data often lacks a distinct material form and presence,
which restricts the ability to casually engage with it as an everyday
resource for reflecting on life experiences.
Road Echoes provides the materialization of personal data that has
already been passively collected and allows users the interact with that
data. With this materialization of data Road Echoes allows you to reflect
and reminisce about your road trip experience as this is an experience
that you tend to forget. It triggers different memories beyond what photos
can achieve. With Road Echoes you are able to relive those moments by
capturing the essence of a road trip by linking music to locations.