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Surround body experience - 27th September 2023
Deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people came together at a concert in New York to enjoy classical music, all wearing haptic harnesses, wrist and ankle bracelets, which translated the sound onto the skin via vibration.
Providing the wearable technology was Music: Not Impossible. Flavia Naslausky is the head of business development for the company.
Flavia Naslausky: "As you know already, this was designed with and inspired by the deaf community. And along this journey, though, we realised that everybody wants to use it. This is about shared connections, shared experiences, bringing people together that otherwise wouldn't be together."
After years of research, they've succeeded in engineering a complete platform for composing, translating and sending audio vibrations wirelessly to the users' bodies with almost zero sound delay. The equipment can be adjusted, depending on the type of concert and style of music. Patrick Hanlon's a co-founder of Music: Not Impossible.
Patrick Hanlon: "For an orchestra, I'm gonna have the violins across the chest and we're gonna put the cello and the bass elements in the back, and then we'll have some horns and stuff over the shoulders. But if I was to use it for a techno gig, it would be kick drum, snare, hats maybe on the shoulders, so it's a little bit of a different approach."
Described as a 'Surround Body Experience', the harness and wrist and ankle bands supply 8 distinct areas of vibration across the user's body. Wearers can control the intensity of the vibrations, which are represented by colour LED lights.
Jay Zimmerman's a deaf person, a musical theatre composer and one of the first people to test the devices when they were first trialled in 2018.
Jay Zimmerman: "It was super exciting. I was super excited because it has come a long way. Originally, it was actually wired up like I'm gonna be electrocuted. And now they're separate. So it was very, very exciting, but I still feel, you know, down the road, I'm always like, we wanna go, we wanna take it to the next level."
Previously the only way for deaf people to have a sensory experience at a concert was to hold an inflated balloon and to feel its vibrations. The Music: Not Impossible devices take this to a whole new level. Celebrated musician Pharrell has even commented that it is the future of music.
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