Tempera

It started with a weekend question. What would a song look like if we let it onto the wall instead of a phone’s lock screen? The first version was a browser page on a studio Mac. It set the track title in big serif type over a slow wash of colour, and we expected it to last a weekend. It is still running.

The colour comes from the album sleeve. Tempera pulls a palette from the artwork and builds a moving field out of it. A Sunday jazz record fills the frame with browns and creams, while a club track turns it acid. There are five ways of drawing that field, from a soft aurora to overlapping ripples. You decide how restless it gets.

We hit a wall early. Streaming services used to tell developers a song’s tempo and mood. That data is no longer open to new projects, so the frame had to learn to listen instead. With the microphone on, it picks out the onsets, estimates the beat and pulses in time. That turned out better than the plan. It reacts to the music as it actually sounds in your kitchen, volume, chatter and all.

Living with it taught us what to leave out. No album art on screen, because the frame should feel like a painting, not a jukebox. No badges or chips. When nothing is playing it becomes a quiet clock, a thin ring that winds on through one minute and unwinds through the next. And there is a small QR code in the corner, so anyone who asks “what is this?” can open the song on their own phone.

The open question is the object itself. A matte e-ink panel looks like a print and gives off no light, but it refreshes slowly and can’t animate. A proper screen shows every movement and glows like a screen. We are testing both before we commit. In the meantime we are printing our favourite frames as small numbered editions. That is the most honest test we know of whether anyone wants the pictures.