Physical Traces and Materialization of Songs for Individuals’ Music Participation in Cafés: The Design and Field Studies of Camue

Expressing and sharing an individual’s music in public spaces are part of making creative culture. We designed a frame-shaped song ticket shredding speaker, called Camue, to investigate how the materialization of songs and their physical traces can facilitate music playing and sharing experiences in public spaces. Camue was deployed in two cafés for three weeks, providing music playback experience to 41 customers and 10 recruited participants. The findings showed the materialization of songs and physical traces affected users to motivate and engage their participation. The exposure of users’ actions when playing songs by putting a tangible paper ticket into Camue helped users to mediate between their personal music taste while considering the public ambience of the café. Our findings imply new insights into how the co-creation of physical remnants can trigger meaningful interpretations, and what factors are needed for designing artefacts that enable better music expression of individuals in public.