Feeling the Signal: Hacking Music Into Touch
This talk explores how music can be experienced beyond hearing through touch, movement, and atmosphere. Inspired by the speaker’s personal experience as a hard-of-hearing music listener who loves going to music events, the project investigates how technology can create alternative sensory pathways for perceiving rhythm, emotion, and musical structure. Drawing from interviews, body-mapping experiments, and iterative prototyping, the talk presents a real-time system that translates musical features into tactile and visual experiences through haptic wearables, pneumatic interfaces, and generative visuals. Audience members will also have the opportunity to experience the prototypes firsthand, including a tactile composition created for “UV” by Vril, demonstrating how music can be felt through the body as rhythm, emotion, and shared physical presence. In addition to presenting prototypes, the talk explores how accessibility technology can function as a form of sensory enhancement and creative expression.
Saturday 2100 Crystal Ballroom
