‘Music should be for everyone’ is a sentiment we can all agree with, but the Junge Symphoniker Hamburg has taken this one step further by co-developing the Sound Shirt with CuteCircuit, the London-based pioneers of wearable technology.
The Sound Shirt enables deaf people to experience the orchestra’s classical repertoire thanks its state-of-the-art technology.
Microphones placed on stage pick up the distinct sounds of different sections of the orchestra and software converts these sounds into digital data, which it sends to the shirt. Here the data is picked up by 16 actuators that convert the data into motion — vibrations that pulsate with the intensity of the music, with, for example, the bass on the stomach and the violins along the arms.
The shirt was six months in development and proved a huge hit on its first outing, as a recent video shows.
Now interested deaf people can register on Sound Shirt’s dedicated website where they will be entered into a raffle for upcoming concerts by the orchestra.
