Nomination
The SoundShirt brings music to life in a way that it can be felt physically, live, in real time, on the body, in a tactile language unique to each piece of music being performed, opening new and diverse ways of enjoying music for the audience.
Using the SoundShirt, it is now possible to feel each passage of the music and each section of the orchestra as a unique and separate haptic sensation during a live performance. The orchestra’s instruments are mapped to different areas of the garment; for example, the sounds of the violin section, being more energetic and lighter, are felt along the arms and shoulders, while deeper sounds such as bass or kettle drums are felt in the lower areas of the back and torso. The entire composition comes to life as a sensory language composed of a series of haptic, tactile, vibratory, and touch-like sensations across the body of the person wearing the shirt. The shirt is wirelessly connected to a computer on stage that is running the music analysis software algorithms in real-time, so the sensation of the music is always perfectly synchronized with the live performance of the orchestra.
Going through months of user testing, CuteCircuit created this unique wearable technology completely in-house, starting from the fashion design, to the hardware design, the actuation modules, and the software development. The SoundShirt contains 30 individual powerful miniature actuation modules controlled by the CuteCircuit Q software, the ultra-low latency computer software that translates the music captured from the instruments (via microphones placed on stage) into haptic data that gets streamed to the shirts of the audience members in real-time for a truly immersive music experience.
Credits
Cofounder CuteCircuit, CEO: Ryan Genz
Cofounder CuteCircuit, Chief Creative Director: Francesca Rosella
CUTECIRCUIT Founded in 2004, CuteCircuit is the world’s first wearable-technology fashion brand. CuteCircuit interweaves leading edge fashion design with emerging technologies and smart fabrics to create fashions that not only look beautiful, but carry within them magical capabilities and interactive connections which create a new paradigm for both innovation and sustainable fashion production. CuteCircuit’s co-founders, Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, have a background in fashion design (Valentino), and interaction design and anthropology respectively and hold a number of patents in the field of wearable technology, such as 3D Augmented Reality Audio, Interactive Luminous Garments, and Sensor Enhanced Fabric constructions.