The digital realm plays an important role in our everyday life and our dependence on it is still growing. All of our valuable, personal information is stored online and protected by passwords. These passwords are our digital 'door lock'.
For maximum safety, the strength of a password depends on its randomness. The less human logic is involved the better. Unfortunately, this absence of logic makes it almost impossible for people to remember the most secure passwords. Convenience and security seem to be impossible to combine. Programs such as '1Password' have tried to solve this problem by saving all your passwords in one place. However, this storage system is once again protected by a password.
People have been dealing with the problem of remembering and passing on complex information for thousands of years and continuously sought to develop solutions to make this process easier. Aboriginals already used song lines to navigate through landscapes and minstrels as well as Indians used song to pass on history. Combining text with sound optimizes our capability to remember; a technique we have forgotten in our digital era, but which could still be useful now. This form of 'sensorial programming of the human mind' relies on using the range of our human senses to remember complicated data.
In the project Sensorial Password Encryption the sense of hearing and touch are used to function as a reminder for your password. A randomly generated password - a mix of capitals, lowercase, numbers and signs - is linked to a random melody of eight tones, which can be adjusted to personal preferences. By repetitively reading and listening, the melody and the password eventually become linked. From then on, hearing this melody will help as a trigger to remember your password. As it is not always possible to listen to your melody, it is translated into an object via a visual, musical notation: your physical password for life. This object * offers a way to 'read' the melody by using your sense of touch.
