Time Warp Radio

Part accessible design project, part electronic art, Time Warp Radio is a series of handcrafted music players designed for people living with dementia that evoke the experience of hearing 1950s music on radios from that era.

Backstory

Late in 2023, my father handed me a bag containing a handful of audio cassette tapes. They’d been sitting idly on a shelf in his basement for years, and it had been decades, I would guess, since he’d listened to them; decades since he’d last owned a cassette player. He was “getting rid of stuff” (a perpetual pastime of his) and was about to throw them out, but thought to ask if I might want them. Most were of no interest, but a few, labeled “Alan Freed Show” and “Alan Freed's Live Radio Concert”, caught my attention. I took them home, eventually listening to them on a cassette player borrowed from a friend. I was curious to peek into the world they captured — a world my father once inhabited.

My father loves 1950s rock & roll and doo-wop music. It’s the music he grew up with and the music that has stayed with him. He has often regaled me with stories of discovering this music as a teenager: the records he owned, the live performances he saw, and the radio personalities — Alan Freed in particular — who introduced him to it all. I imagined he must have loved listening to these recordings of Freed’s radio shows. It didn’t make sense to me that he was so readily discarding them. If he had a cassette player, would he listen to them again?

I figured I’d buy him a cassette player and return the tapes — but first I wanted to listen a few more times. As I did so, I became reacquainted with the “user interface” of cassette technology — an interface that once felt natural (at least to those of us who grew up with cassettes) but now seemed almost impossibly clunky, certain to frustrate a user like my octogenarian father, who lives with a degree of cognitive impairment and has limited manual dexterity.

Consider what’s involved in playing a cassette tape: You have to get the cassette into the player, correctly oriented. You have to choose the correct “side” of the cassette to play, based on where the tape is currently spooled. When the tape reaches the end of that side, you must repeat the process to play the other side. If you want to repeat the last song you heard, you have to rewind, stopping every so often to see if you’ve gone far enough — but hopefully not too far. If you want to skip the current song, you must go through the same process with the “fast-forward” function. Sometimes the player, for no apparent reason, goes rogue and eats the tape, pulling it out of the cassette, and you have to wind it back up with a pencil. I tried to imagine my father doing any of this; I doubted he could manage it. And even if he could, would it allow him to enjoy the experience of listening to music?

I thought about other options. I considered digitizing the audio and putting in on an MP3 player, but that seemed likely to create a different set of challenges. I’d watched him struggle with cellphones and TV remotes; even the simplest of MP3 players seemed like a bad bet, if mainly due to the small size of the device and its controls. Music players designed specifically for people with dementia are available, but I wasn’t able to find one that had exactly the features I would have wanted for him, and reviews of these products were mixed.

I discussed some of these thoughts with a friend, who, in a moment of misunderstanding, asked if I was attempting to build a MP3 player for my father. That possibility hadn't occurred to me. Could I build him a music player — one that would better meet his needs than the commercial offerings? I wasn’t sure.

Two knobs and a dial

Before long, a second angle on this nascent design project emerged: Wouldn’t it be fun, perhaps even a bit magical, to hear the music of the 1950s on a listening device from that era? And might the user-interface of such a device be ideal for a user whose ability to remember his distant past was, at this point, a relative cognitive strength?

The record player and the radio were common music listening devices in the 1950s, and the radio user-interface, in its most basic form, was the simpler of the two. It had two controls - a tuning knob, to select the radio station, and a volume knob, to set the loudness. A single display element known as a dial (sometimes just a set of numbers printed on or around the tuning knob) indicated which radio station was selected.

Could this user-interface be adapted to form the basis of an accessible MP3 player? It seemed straightforward in principle: substitute the notion of a “playlist” in place of a radio station; have the tuning knob select from a pre-configured set of playlists on an MP3 player, and the volume knob control the MP3 player volume.

An informal design specification

I found the idea of building such a device compelling enough to pursue, and it seemed achievable: old radios were available at reasonable cost, and the technical feasibility of repurposing one, using hobby-oriented electronic components, had been demonstrated via similar projects. I decided to embark, with the following design guidelines in mind:

• The device would be built by repurposing an actual 1950s radio receiver. ^[1]  To achieve the simplest user-interface, an AM-only radio (i.e. having only a single set of numbers on the dial) would be used.
• The radio’s original tuning control would select from a set of “channels”, each assigned to a number on the dial (actual radio frequencies play no role here, so there is freedom to locate channels at any dial position); each channel would be associated with a playlist on the MP3 player, and when a channel was selected, the device would play the associated playlist.
• The radio’s original volume control would adjust the volume.

To keep the design as simple as possible, features that weren’t important for the target user group would be excluded. Accordingly, the device

• would play only from a fixed selection of music stored internally; it would not have the ability to stream music from the internet or from other devices, nor would the user be able to easily change the selection of stored music.
• would have a single speaker (not stereo), and need not have particularly high sound quality or loud volume; it would not support the use of headphones.
• would not be portable, and therefore would be powered by an AC/DC adapter rather than batteries.

Time Warp Radios 1, 2 & 3

Over the course of 2024-25 I built several of these “radio-interface” MP3 players. I’ll refer to these objects as radios for simplicity, although they no longer operate as radio receivers.

Radio #1

Radio #1 is based on the General Electric P-745B, an early transistor radio introduced in the late 1950s. Per the design outlined above, the original volume control adjusts the volume, and the original tuning control selects the channel (i.e. playlist). Channels are assigned to each number printed on the dial — 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, and 16 — for a total of 7 channels.

The original power switch, built in to the volume control, turns the device on and off. When powered on, the device plays continuously, looping through the playlist assigned to the selected channel. It is silent when the tuning control is not aligned with a channel.

Radio #1 was successful as a proof of concept, but it quickly became apparent that some of the physical characteristics of the P-745 were less than ideal for the target user group:

• The thumbwheels that control both the volume and tuning can be more difficult to turn than regular knobs, especially for those with limited manual dexterity.
• The tuning system requires aligning a number on the tuning wheel with a small notch on the case to the right of the wheel, which may not be obvious.
• Having the dial numbers printed on the tuning wheel causes the orientation of the numbers to change as the wheel is rotated, introducing an additional potential source of difficulty for a cognitively-impaired user.
• Having the power switch combined with the volume control conflates two distinct functions, needlessly complicating the user’s understanding of to how operate the device. It also forces the user to re-adjust the volume every time the unit is switched on.

Additionally, I came to reconsider several elements of the overall design:

• Continuous playback (looping the selected playlist indefinitely) was perhaps not the best design choice for a cognitively impaired user, who may not remember to turn the device off (perhaps they’ve left the room and can no longer hear the audio), or may believe the device is off when it isn’t (perhaps they’ve turned the volume down too low to hear). It would be better if the device would automatically shut off after some time.
• The inability to navigate within a playlist, skipping ahead to the next track or back to the previous one, felt excessively limiting to me, and I imagined that frustration would be shared by a subset of the target user group (those who were still capable of experiencing the desire for this flexibility). Although adding this functionality would complicate the ideal of the “two knobs and a dial” user interface, it seemed like the right trade-off.

Radio #2

Radio #2 attempts to address the weaknesses identified with Radio #1 above. Based on the Motorola 62X, a table-top tube radio introduced in the early 1950s, the 62X features large knobs that are easy to grip and turn, and a separate dial with large printed numbers having a fixed orientation. There are 8 numbers on the dial, allowing for 8 channels. An LED strip (added, not part of the original unit) illuminates the dial plate when the device is powered on, both for aesthetic appeal and to make it easier to read in lower light conditions.

Several pushbuttons (added, not part of the original unit) are mounted on the top panel of the cabinet. The leftmost button turns the device on and off, and includes a built-in LED to indicate when the device is powered on. The rightmost pair of buttons enable navigation within the current playlist, moving forward or backward to the next or previous track.

Rather than playing continuously, Radio #2 automatically turns off when the end of the current playlist is reached.

Radio #3

Radio #3 returns to the smaller, lighter form factor of Radio #1, but includes the additional control buttons introduced with Radio #2. Based on the General Electric P-807, another transistor radio introduced a few years after the P-745, Radio #3 is much smaller than Radio #2 but slightly larger than Radio #1, allowing for the inclusion of the additional buttons. The navigation buttons are mounted on the right side of the device, and the on/off button is mounted on the front below the tuning wheel.

For a user that is comfortable operating thumbwheel controls and reading a rotating dial, Radio #3 offers a nice compromise: the functionality of Radio #2 with a form comparable to Radio #1.