Vibrating suits offer a new way to experience music
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We often think of music as a mostly auditory experience, but it’s also a physical one, especially for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. Daniel Belquer — a Philadelphia-based technologist, composer and “chief vibrational officer” of Music: Not Impossible — has been studying the relationship between sound and sensation, and how that connection can make music more accessible. “Marketplace Tech” spoke with Belquer about how his vibrating technology is helping people experience music in new ways.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How Vibrations can help everyone feel the beat. |
| 0:06.1 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:09.2 | I'm Lily Dramale. We tend to think of music as a largely auditory experience, but it's also a physical experience, especially |
| 0:26.2 | for people who are deaf and heart of hearing. |
| 0:29.0 | A Philadelphia-based technologist and composer has been studying the relationship between sound and |
| 0:35.0 | sensation. We spoke with him about how his technology is helping more people |
| 0:39.6 | feel music. My name is Daniel Belker and I'm the chief vibrational officer for music not impossible. |
| 0:49.2 | We call our technology or solution per se the hardware suits because it includes a harness but also two wrist and two ankle bands. |
| 0:59.0 | So I call it a surround body experience. |
| 1:02.0 | So regarding the placement of the vibrations throughout the person's body, |
| 1:07.0 | we have actuators, as we call them, the vibrating points placed on the shoulders, the ribcage the sides of the back in the |
| 1:15.7 | middle of the back the bottom of the back and we also have you know the wrist and ankle |
| 1:21.1 | bands to spread the vibrations all throughout the body |
| 1:26.5 | and each point is individually addressable meaning we can control them individually. |
| 1:33.0 | So let's think about a hypothetical music scenario. |
| 1:37.0 | So the musicians are playing on stage and we're transmitting, let's say, |
| 1:42.0 | the guitars to the shoulders. |
| 1:43.0 | The voice goes to the ribcage. |
| 1:49.0 | The high hat goes through the wrists and so on so forth, but everything is dynamically assignable |
| 1:56.9 | in real time. |
| 1:59.5 | The target originally was to focus exclusively on death and heart of hearing. |
| 2:05.0 | But because we found that everybody enjoys the immersive component of the experience, |
... |
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