Investigating Ways for Multiple People to be Engaged in the Same Auditory Environment by Naveen R.

Today’s music streaming services do not allow people to listen to music together. I often find myself working with peers in a library, coffee shop, or classroom, faced with the dilemma of whether to work together, and go through the awkward process of splitting headphones, or listening to different music and collaborating less. If you walk through any public workspace, you can observe people with headphones on, immersed in their own soundscapes. This project will study identify ways to split sound from one device into multiple headphones. This will allow multiple people to be engaged in the same auditory environment. Sharing the same music while working may increase collaboration and productivity, as well as bringing the communal and social aspect back into music...During the first phase of research, I will focus on programming the splitter. The project has already brought up some difficult problems that I’ll need to work with my mentor to solve. I’ll start by solidifying my minimum viable product (MVP), which in this case is a program that allows audio to be simultaneously played through to laptops. After I have a clear plan of exactly what I want to code, I’ll work with my mentor on researching more resources to build the application. I will be coding the app in Java. I’ll need to construct a media player interface, a server which relays the audio data, and code which manages the input of the code. One I have a functional project I’ll work on making it have an intuitive and aesthetically suitable user interface. Finally, I’ll work on making the app available for mobile...