The Walking Muse

Finding mindfulness in every step

An interactive experience that synchronizes music with your walking pace, creating moments of awareness and presence in everyday movement.

About The Project

The Walking Muse is an everyday companion that helps you become more aware of your body through the act of walking. As you walk, the music shifts to match your pace: walk faster, and the tempo picks up; slow down, and the rhythm slows with you.

Unlike instrumental mindfulness apps, The Walking Muse doesn’t ask you to sit down or calculate your performance. Instead, it offers a subtle biofeedback experience that helps you notice your body naturally through sound.

Designed to integrate with existing music streaming services, it transforms your daily walks into opportunities for greater presence and embodied awareness.

A Personal Journey

The Walking Muse emerged from my health journey. Growing up in Hong Kong, I was immersed in a culture of speed. There’s a Cantonese saying that translates to “Don’t stop the world from” spinning”—basically meaning don’t be slow. I was constantly pushed toward achievement and efficiency.

When I was 14, a serious illness hospitalized me for a month. During my recovery, my father said something that stayed with me: “Give her time to get better. No rush.” This experience taught me that healing has its own rhythm – you can’t force it. It completely shifted how I think about time, patience, and what really matters.

Years later, this insight became the foundation for The Walking Muse – an invitation to bring awareness to one of our most fundamental activities: walking.

Design Process

The Walking Muse emerged from my personal journey with mindfulness through illness and healing, combined with ethnographic observations of walking patterns and technology use on campus.

The design evolved through three iterations, each refining the relationship between walking pace and musical response. User testing with both meditation novices and experienced practitioners revealed how differently people engage with mindfulness technologies.

The final design uses smartphone sensors to detect walking patterns and subtly adjusts music tempo in response, creating a biofeedback loop that heightens awareness without demanding conscious effort.

Conceptual Framework

The Walking Muse operates at the intersection of embodied cognition, predictive processing, and mindfulness practice. This design creates a space where technology becomes a scaffold for self-reflection.

The Sonic Experience

The Walking Muse transforms your personal music into a responsive soundtrack for mindfulness. User testing revealed how differently people engage with this sonic experience:

• Some actively explored the system’s boundaries by intentionally changing their pace
• Others found that simply maintaining a steady rhythm created a meditative state
• Many discovered a new relationship with familiar songs when experienced through mindful movement

This varied engagement highlights how personal and individual the mindfulness journey can be. Here are some of the comments from participants:

“Instead of me using music, I feel like music is going through me more.”

“I don’t think I have ever had that moment of walking that slowly next to that building and actually seeing what’s inside.”

“Even now, I’m still aware of my body. The Walking Muse helped me discover a completely new way of experiencing music while walking.”

“We should take our time and use our designer’s eyes to appreciate the wisdom in every corner of the world. Like planting a seed, our role is not to control how it grows. Plant the seed and share it, then every second and hour that follows, through blossom and end of life, we are nourishing the lives on earth with our wisdom.”

— Excerpt from my thesis, “Designing for Mindful Moments”, 2025