Tangible Jukebox: Back to Palpable Music

Since commercial musical recordings became available about a century ago and until very recently, they had always been distributed by means of a physical support Nowadays that record companies have ultimately started to distribute music over the Internet, "music" does not use physical space anymore, and we can now store amazingly large music collection in our computers or portable music players But this etherealness does not come without some drawbacks, such as browsing by the covers or organizing and grouping elements or collections In this paper we propose a system in which files (intangible) become physical objects again, thus recovering part of the mysticism related with vinyls or compact discs, without loosing most of the benefits inherent to digital data, and applying at the same time some advantages that tangible and tabletop interfaces can offer Complementarily, and from a more agnostic perspective, this paper also starts to explore on the tangible manipulation of sets or collections of items