Donda Stemplayer: Toy or Innovation?
Kanye West is a man that requires no introduction. He’s been splattered all over mainstream media for the past 15 years for his egotistical attitude, expensive clothing, politics and even music sometimes. All of his antics can make it easy to forget that Kanye started as a humble music producer on the south side of Chicago. He’s been steadily releasing cutting-edge hiphop albums throughout his career, but with his most recent record titled “Donda”, he’s dipped his toes into the world of ubiquitous computing.
Kanye partnered with the London tech company: Kano to develop a palm-sized device titled the “Stemplayer” which can play all of the songs off of Donda. Rather than storing a single mp3 file for a song like an iPod, the Stemplayer separates each track into four mp3 “stems”: vocals, drums, melody and bass. Each of these stems can be controlled in real-time to add/remove aspects of a track. Although this may seem like a gimmick, manipulating stems is only the launch pad for the Stemplayer’s feature set which allows users to further mix and mangle all of Donda’s tracks.
Before diving further into the Stemplayer’s features, it’s worth exploring what makes up the product physically. The exterior consists of a tan elastic rubber which looks and feels oddly skin-like. In terms of interaction points, the player’s edge has a power button, two volume buttons and two more for switching songs. The device’s front face has a central pause/return button and four linear divots which receive touch/slide inputs. Upon registering an input, the targeted pad will provide feedback both through a change in lighting display and haptic rumble to demonstrate the user’s change. All of this hardware fits inside a smooth disc which is 3–4 inches in diameter.
The feature list for this tiny skin disc is longer than you might expect given its simplicity. Of course, you can listen to Donda’s tracks like an mp3 player, but the device’s draw comes from the four haptic channels which allow you to mix the musical stems of a song as it plays. Simply removing the vocals or drums from a track can transform booming songs into intimate ones and vice versa.
Beyond this point, the Stemplayer’s features become less and less obvious. If you hold down the pause button during playback, the four channels will now control the playback speed and can capture a looping segment of the song. From this new interface, you can press one of the volume buttons to begin applying effects to the captured portion of the track such as reverb and delay. Lastly once you’ve decided on stems, speed and effects you can record the loop you’ve created and save it to the device. If that sounds confusing it’s because it is; at least initially. Here’s a video capturing these capabilities.
It may be shocking that so many use cases hide inside the minimal Stemplayer, but do these numerous features come at the cost of system coherence and intuitiveness? Is the Stemplayer an expensive toy full of obtuse processes or is it an innovative music device that could spell the future for musical ubiquitous computing? To explore this question objectively, we can evaluate the product according to Jacob Neilsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. Since not all of these heuristics apply directly to the player (e.g. error handling), we can splice in other popular heuristics originally targeted for persuasive health devices. The Stemplayer’s satisfaction of these heuristics is separated below into The Good, The Bad and The “Ye” (arguable).
The Good
- Aesthetic and Minimal Design
Disclaimer: you will look cool using the Stemplayer. The device’s smooth shape and outer material along with its limited buttons makes it look like a piece of captured alien technology. All of the motions you make on the Stemplayer are smooth and gradual which gives even inexperienced users an air of expertise. Nielsen claims that minimalist designs should focus on their essential use cases, and Kano’s player triples down on this idea. The only obvious visual cues on the device upon booting are four glowing stem strips that pulse along with the song and beg for interaction. Basically, the product’s presentation is top notch and it delivers visually on its standout feature: playing stems.
2. Error Prevention
One of the ways in which the Donda Stemplayer prevents huge system errors is by limiting user freedom. It may feel like you have the music world at your fingertips, but all of the song alterations you can make are highly quantized. Volume of each stem for instance, can only be shifted to 4–8 different levels corresponding with the four glowing dots on each strip. Each track can only be sped up to four predetermined speeds. Lastly, there are only 8 stock effects that can be applied to the audio and each effect has 8 levels of intensity. Jumping to specified values rather than giving the user full reign affords the player more system stability. Additionally, any “whoops” errors made when editing a loop can be quickly undone by clicking the middle button.
3. Customization
If you connect your Stemplayer to your computer and visit Stemplayer.com, you can change configurations such as the four speeds selected during playback, hitbox size/sensitivity of stem strips, fast-forward amount and volume cap. These online settings are neat, but what demonstrates the player as a product rather than a toy is the upload feature. On their website, you can upload your own mp3 files and download them onto the device where they’ll be split (with varying accuracy) into their four stems. A Stemplayer containing only Donda is little more than a collector’s item, but being able to select your own library of stems turns it into a useful music production tool.
The Bad
4. Help and Documentation
There is none. The Stemplayer does not come with an instruction manual that almost every piece of technology includes. If you visit the website and select “Info”, you will receive a list of all the products features, but no guidance to access these features. It’s as if Kano taunts you with the treasure without providing a treasure map. I will say, having no blueprint for using the Stemplayer gamified my exploration of its features. Everytime I pressed a new combination of buttons a new interface would appear and the song’s sound would shift. It was fun, but detrimental to the device’s usability.
5. Match Between System and Real World
The player’s lack of a screen already puts it at a deficit when meeting real-world conventions. There are no words on the device, so learning how a current interface will affect a song means fiddling around with the levels. To Kano’s credit, the lights and sliders on the device create a coherent metaphor for a mixing board considering the lights adjust as you slide up and down. Beyond the basic features however, the intentional lack of hardware means that Kano runs out of metaphors. Apply effects to a track by pressing the volume up button while paused is nowhere near intuitive. All deeper features are masked in button combinations that resemble alien life more so than the real world.
6. Consistency and Standards
Again, Kano deserves some credit because even with the Stemplayer’s oddities, it does follow the standard button configurations of a phone or mp3 player. There’s a power button, two volume buttons and buttons to switch songs. Every aspect of the product that ventures from being just a music player will require a different part of your brain entirely. The first major hurdle of internal consistency is the pause button. If you’re listening normally, the center button will pause the song. If you hold the pause button, you now enter the looping interface while the song plays. Now, if you decide to press the button again, instead of pausing, it will delete your loop selection and return to the song interface. The Stemplayer regularly remaps the buttons for new interfaces out of necessity which creates tremendous cognitive load on new users. It may even be difficult for users to find what interface they’re in without listening for changing audio cues.
The “Ye”
7. Visibility of System Status
As mentioned, the lack of a conventional screen makes visibility a core roadblock for the Stemplayer. You will never know the name of the song you’re currently playing, and there is no support for song selection; just next and previous. The pulsing lights however, make it incredibly clear to the user when a song is playing as well as what stems are activated to what level. Even in the looping interface, the lights travel across a stem repeatedly to show that a loop is playing as well as the loop’s length. Each interface also has its own color palette which while lacking accessibility consideration, decreases confusion. One last visibility gripe is with the Replay function. Nearly every recording device has a glowing red dot when something is recording, but the Stemplayer has the user hold the volume buttons to start and stop recording. There is no visible indication and I forgot multiple times that my player was recording while experimenting.
8. User Control and Freedom
Kano decided to limit the player’s sliders to a set of quantized values which removes user freedom while offering greater user control. You can’t accidentally apply the wrong speed if there are only four choices. Whipping up a cool loop with these limited sliders can take as little as 10 seconds once you’re comfortable and there is little consequence for an incorrect action since you can always move a slider back. If you’ve gone too far and created a cacophonous sound, just tap the center button to clear your edits. Unfortunately there is no redo button, so I accidentally deleted a few of my loops along the way.
9. Recognition > Recall
The most egregious recall requirement of the Stemplayer is remembering what effects are loaded onto it. You obviously can’t see the effect’s name and all 10 of them are laid out in a row of lights. The fastest way to find the one you’re looking for is to cycle through all of them. In a way, the looping audio is a constant reminder of what track you’re editing as well as what alterations you’ve made, so most of the Stemplayer’s cognitive load comes from a learning curve rather than memory storage.
10. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
As awkward as the Stemplayer can be on first contact, creating a cool and unique sound becomes intuitive and quick after even 30 minutes of use. If anything, the most arduous part comes when you have recorded your loops and need to export them to your computer with a USB connection. Rather than packing the device with shortcuts, the player consists only of shortcuts that must be learned for proper use. The one feature that cannot be sped up however, is fast forwarding through songs. Even if you configure the FF time to its maximum 20 seconds, holding down the volume buttons and waiting for the right moment always feels slow compared to the lightning fast editing of loops.
In Conclusion
It doesn’t feel like Kano was even trying to make a usability-minded device with the Stemplayer. Instead they were inviting a subsection of Kanye’s fanbase on a journey to test how miniature and minimal a music player could be while staying effective. Picking apart the player according to heuristics seems mismatched in some sense because Kano’s design was decidedly different. The way the Stemplayer bucks conventions makes it an obtuse and unfriendly device for some, but also a potentially bold vision of how people will experience music in the future.
The main audience for the Stemplayer is clearly not music producers. The device’s original $200 price tag is egregious considering Midi Keyboards equipped with drum pads, arpeggiators and other tools are sold for as little as $150. Additionally, the decentralized nature of recording and uploading the player’s loops makes integrating it not worth a real producer’s time.
Instead, the Stemplayer targets engaged music fans looking to make their listening experience more playful. As a member of this group, I found it enthralling to mold Kanye’s songs like clay and effortlessly create little loops for my collection. This not only gamified my listening session, but I ended each track with a greater appreciation for the original song’s construction. I would love it if more artists released their music in the Stemplayer’s dissectible format, but what is their incentive to act on this trend?
For one, the current landscape of streaming services has made music careers less viable than ever with Spotify and Apple Music artists averaging $0.004 and $0.007 per stream respectively. Not to mention, that sum gets split up between labels, publishers and other distributors. It’s hard to blame artists for being disenchanted with this model. Meanwhile, Kanye’s expensive Stemplayer, which is the only medium to hear his new album, sold thousands of units immediately making him several million dollars in just a week. Most of the player’s overnight success surely came from Kanye’s existing fame/brand, but the device still demonstrates a more exclusive, fun and profitable way to roll out one’s music.
Since the Stemplayer has been so well received despite its atypical design, what if this success inspires others to release their music on the player for a better profit? Or what if other artists/innovators get inspired to create their own music playing gadgets to rival the Stemplayer and form coalitions of device-exclusive artists? Whether or not an explosion of interactive music listening takes place, the Stemplayer will still go down in ubicomp history for all its oddity.
