![]() ![]() From here it can be easy to get lost, and recalling the quirks to control the Stem Player can be tricky. To access more complex controls, like looping or adding effects like echo, you have to hold a slightly more esoteric combination of buttons on the side of the device-like the buttons that allow you to change the volume up or down, or skip songs ahead or back. ![]() A shared mythology of joint exploration and creation, like Lego or Minecraft, rather than just the broadcast and receive of traditional media-or the ‘creator’/’consumer’ divide,” Klein writes. Powerful.” according to Klein, that turns recorded music into something more akin to building blocks. Every song you try takes mere moments to deconstruct through an experience designed to be “Simple. The beauty of the Stem Player is that its most superficial controls are an intuitive joy to play with. Adjusting the volume of any stem is as easy as swiping, while the aforementioned haptics demonstrate that the object is sensing you. To adjust these stems, you drag your finger over a giant plus sign on top of the device. The fourth stem always feels like a bit of a crapshoot, filling in whatever else is necessary to the song, from doubling up a chord to incorporating more random sounds. Usually that means vocals are clean on one stem, while chords and samples will be on another, and beats will be on another. On the Stem Player, the system organizes any song into just four tracks. Think of stems like a more manageable user interface for scoring music. But a song could easily have a dozen or more such tracks, requiring those huge honking boards full of knobs and sliders you see in music studios. All recorded music consists of layered tracks, which allow sound engineers to isolate a lead guitar from a rhythm guitar, for example. It’s about four-dimensional usage, physical and present-rather than a flat, anonymous, and cold pane of glass.”Īs for where the Stem Player name comes from, well, it plays stems. Smell, taste, touch, sound-embodied in instinctive objects,” writes Klein via text. “We make tech that feels more like an extension of your body. Using it, I’m reminded of experiments by Marc Teyssier, who wrapped an iPhone in an eerily realistic epidermis that you pinched and stroked to control the phone. ![]() But its pantyhose-beige color, coupled with its rounded edges, coupled with vibrating haptics, almost make the Stem Player feel like you’re touching skin. It’s not the first music player with a soft silicone sleeve Microsoft’s Zune did this back in the day. Instead, they are contextualized within a far larger corpus of Ye’s physical and musical work, as an organically intertwined, unflinching statement. These choices could feel like a matchy-matchy branding exercise. The object looks like a Yeezy product, from its rounded form that resembles a pebble more than a box to its neutral silicone sleeve to the unique LED palettes for each track (which Ye curates to live in the same color universe as Yeezy apparel). The Stem Player is intentionally imagining another way forward for music, less about listening to everything you can than savoring what you do. We’ve been able to hold more than 1,000 songs in our pockets for 20 years now, and streaming music from the cloud has only supersized that capacity. The critiques I’ve seen of the Stem Player go something like “I had an MP3 player back in 1998!”Īllow me to clarify from my own experience: No one needs a Stem Player when they already own an iPhone, like no one needs a motorcycle when they already own a minivan. You can also load albums you’ve purchased from other artists onto the device. Instead of listening on streaming services like Spotify, you literally have to plug the Stem Player into your computer, go to, and download the album to listen. The device made headlines a few weeks back when Ye announced an unprecedented move, canceling what he says was a $100 million sponsorship with Apple to release his latest album, Donda 2, exclusively on his own player. Released in 2021, the Stem Player was created by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Alex Klein, founder of the gadget company Kano. ![]()
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