The Audio Happiness Robot

Poking about on a Japanese gadget site, I came across an illuminated, motorized, fish-shaped speaker called the iFish. The description was intriguing: “5 kinds of LED lights flash in many different patterns when music is played through iFish. iFish is capable of changing its feelings from happy to angry by waving its body side to side and by changing the color of the LED lights.”

Reviews are mixed. The Gadgeteer thought that all that blinking and wiggling was hardly worth $65, whereas IGN enjoyed the novelty.

But I started to think that there might be more to this happiness-metering concept. After all, analyzing a song by graphing its frequency, phase, and level is pretty abstract. Today’s audio software is really designed for engineers rather than musicians. Wouldn’t it be more useful to have an emotion meter?

Many of us have had the experience of playing a new song for a pet or a young child and seeing them either dash out of the room or start dancing. Perhaps there’s a way to codify that visceral reaction into a small robot or computer program.