PRESENT
My Final Master Project was carried out at Impulse Audio Lab in Munich, an automotive audio studio working with interactive vehicle sound and audio software. I started the project with the idea of “drivable music”: a music experience that could respond to driving behaviour, route, context, or vehicle data. My PDP framed the project around three goals: eliciting user values for abstract audio experiences, developing advanced interactive sound prototypes, and finding a valid way to evaluate context-dependent automotive UX.
During the project, this direction changed. Impulse had strong technical capabilities, but the question was not only what could be built. The real challenge was understanding what interactive in-car music should mean for drivers. Through context mapping, prototyping, and user testing, the project shifted from adapting music to the drive toward helping drivers find music by listening and feeling. This became In-Tune: a multimodal interface for in-car music browsing built around one motorized fader, four gestures, three interaction layers, and a music pipeline running underneath.
This shift became the central learning of my FMP. I entered with a technology-driven idea, but learned to let user values, embodied interaction, and industry constraints reshape the design vision.
User & Society
User & Society became the area that redirected the project most strongly. My PDP already identified a key problem: users often cannot articulate needs for novel audio experiences, especially when the experience does not yet exist. Because of this, I did not start by asking participants what feature they wanted. Instead, I used context mapping to uncover values, tensions, and latent needs around music in the car.
The sensitizing booklet and Lego-based generative workshop helped participants express memories, routines, frustrations and imagined futures around music listening. The analysis revealed that people did not talk about music mainly as content, but as a way of moving through time: reconnecting with the past, regulating the present, and preparing for what comes next. This insight reframed the project. The opportunity was no longer simply to make music react to driving data, but to design an interaction that lets people move through their own musical history and current mood without needing to specify everything in words.
The simulator study then tested whether this interaction made sense in a driving context. Participants showed that they often select music by mood rather than by title, that rediscovering forgotten songs created strong affective moments, and that audio and haptic feedback could support more eyes-free browsing. At the same time, the study exposed limitations: too many categories overwhelmed users, dwell-based selection created uncertainty, and any screen content still attracted attention away from the road.
This changed how I see user research. I previously treated it mainly as validation. In this project, user research became a way to discover what the project actually was about. It helped me move from a company-driven technology opportunity to a value-driven design direction.
CREATIVITY & AESTHETICS
C&A here was about turning the personal and emotional side of music into an interaction language, and I learned most from the directions that failed. A stem-separation knob that reshaped the playing song was expressive, but it interfered with the artist's work. A voice-first prototype flattened music into words like "happy" or "calm" — and people know the right song when they hear it but can't describe it in advance. Both pushed me to a clearer principle: recognition over specification. Like an old car radio, the fader lets you sweep through previews and stop when something feels right. This is where "multimodal storyteller" stopped being a label and became concrete: the story is carried by sound, touch, and movement instead of a screen — haptic detents make moods legible, smooth motion supports listening across tracks, and edge gestures make it feel like one object. The intelligence hides in the system; the driver just feels a clear musical gesture.
Technology & Realisation
T&R is central to how I think, and this project confirmed why: I can't judge an interaction until I can feel it. I built three iterations, each ruling a direction out — Ableton and stem separation for adaptive control, a voice-and-playlist build for a "narrative drive," and finally p5.js with local audio and a motorized fader for browsing by sound and touch. The fader was the turning point: a plain vibrating slider proved one-dimensional browsing worked, but the motor let me design detents, edge bumps, and elastic resistance — not effects for their own sake, but the interaction grammar itself. It also showed me the cost of doing everything myself: hardware, software, audio, and study prep all competed for the same hours. I want to keep building independently, but bring technical collaborators in earlier when a system gets this complex.
Math Data & Computing
Here the data became design material. In-Tune only works if the music under the fader is ordered in a way that feels right, so I built a pipeline that groups tracks into mood neighbourhoods, drops the ones with little personal meaning, and orders them along an energy axis. The hard part wasn't building it — my background made that doable — it was deciding what the data should do. I deliberately didn't make an autonomous recommender: the system prepares a small space, and the driver still chooses by listening. I also learned that audio features alone aren't enough, because mathematically similar tracks don't always feel musically coherent, and a barely-played song shouldn't weigh the same as one carrying years of meaning. That's the principle I landed on: intelligence in the pipeline, simplicity at the interface.
Business & Entreperneurship
B&E became about designing inside a real company instead of an academic brief. Impulse had real automotive ambitions and a real question: how to turn audio technology into something meaningful for drivers and OEMs. I'd set out to deliver a repeatable validation framework, and I'll be honest that it didn't become a finished one — but the project delivered something more useful to them: a grounded, user-based direction for interactive in-car music, concrete enough that it drew external interest when we pitched it. The biggest shift in my thinking was about feasibility. Some early ideas were exciting but impossible within current automotive hardware and safety constraints, and I stopped treating that as the enemy of the work. Feasibility is a material you design with. B&E, for me, is translating between vision and viability — making an experiential concept demonstrable and relevant enough that a company can see where it goes next.
During his time at IAL, Stefan contributed to a range of client-facing service projects beyond the scope of his own thesis work.
One particular highlight was his involvement in the sound design process for innovative in-vehicle earcons for a large international automotive OEM. His responsibilities included independent concept development, iterative sound design, and contributing to presentations with the client’s stakeholders.
Stefan proved to be a reliable and engaged collaborator. He worked independently when needed, responded well to feedback, and brought a thoughtful and creative approach to the sound design process.
His contributions were highly appreciated by our team, and it was great to see that the results of his work were also received positively by the client.
Dario Doerfler - Interactive Sound Designer, Audio UX
Working with Stefan during his Master’s thesis project at Impulse Audio Lab was a rewarding experience. Many of our projects are driven by customer requests and technology opportunities, so it was refreshing to see a process that started with research and a genuine focus on understanding user needs. His approach brought a different perspective to the team and led to valuable discussions throughout the project.
Stefan was highly engaged throughout the process and showed a strong ability to balance exploration with practical constraints. He was curious, open to feedback, and consistently looked for ways to refine and strengthen the concept. He also kept the team closely involved through regular presentations and updates, making it easy for us to follow the project’s development and contribute where relevant.
From a business and customer perspective, the topic is highly relevant to the automotive audio industry. The concept explores how music discovery and interaction can become more intuitive and less visually demanding, which is particularly important in a driving context. At the same time, it supports the broader industry trend toward software-based experiences that add value for users without requiring additional hardware.
As vehicles continue to evolve into software-defined products, manufacturers are increasingly looking for digital features that can enhance the user experience and help differentiate their offerings. Concepts like the one Stefan developed fit well within this direction and have clear potential for further development.
The interest shown by industry partners and customers during demonstrations and presentations confirmed that the topic resonates beyond an academic setting. Based on the feedback we received, there is clear interest in the underlying ideas and their potential application in future automotive products. From our side, we see the concept as a promising foundation for further collaboration and development with industry partners.
Jonas Kieser - Business & Product Strategist