Touch Acoustics: Reflections on Crafting a Sonic, Textile Interface

Touch Acoustics is a textile surface that responds to touch and maps it to a changing array of generated soundscapes. It interprets body movement into data, measuring pressure intensities to make sense of the duration and spread of touch signals. The surface is enriched by affordances for touch and feeling encountered through textiles, which is shaped by couplings with sonic, temporal form. It explores affinities between textiles, touch and sound in contributing multi-sensory encounters and their role in generating improvised action, expression and emotional reactions. Reflecting on the production of Touch Acoustics expand craft as it incorporates computation, merging material, textural properties with temporal form and computed causality. Collaboration and expertise from an interdisciplinary team of practitioners promote a hybrid, convergent proposition for craft, a continuously evolving, fluid space that moves between multiple domains of making.