Play Your Music in the Most Futuristic Way Possible — with Cubes!

A lot of people think the most futuristic of the solid shapes is a sphere. Those people are wrong. The most futuristic shape is clearly a cube; after all, a cube is the closest you can get to a tesseract in three-dimensional space. With that misconception cleared up, here’s a project that utilizes the ultra-futuristic cube: Michael Teeuw’s MusiCubes music player.

Teeuw built MusiCubes after running into the same problem as many of us who grew up in an era when music came on physical media, which is the lack of tangibility in modern music streaming. Selecting music from a playlist on your phone or asking Alexa to play you a song just isn’t satisfying. There are a lot of options for physically controlling digital music, but the solution Teeuw came up with is particularly intriguing.

At its core, MusiCubes is an RFID-triggered music player. We’ve seen these before, but the physical design of this build is very unique. Instead of using RFID cards, Teeuw placed an RFID tag on each of the six faces of nine transparent cubes (normally used as chic picture frames). That means there are a total of 54 individual playlists, songs, or artists that can be played with this setup.

Those cubes are stored in a laser-cut tray, and one of the recesses in the tray is offset from the others. That recess has the RFID reader embedded underneath, which connects to an ESP8266 and actually controls the music. Capacitive touch sensing is used to skip songs, pause the music, and so on. Finally, there is a strip of WS2812B LEDs underneath the tray to give it a nifty floating effect. The finished product definitely looks futuristic, like a Goa’uld stereo straight out of Stargate SG-1, and has all the tangibility anyone could ask for.