Innovative Shirt Allows the Deaf to Be Touched by Music #WearableWednesday

Although most of the excitement this week has been LED dresses, there is a special buzz with CuteCircuit’s new Sound Shirt which allows deaf people to feel the physical touch of music. The shirt is a collaboration with The Jungen Symphoniker Hamburg who “believe music should be for everyone”. Within the shirt are sensors, similar to their original Hug Shirt, which mimic touching the body. So, different instruments playing during a symphony translate to different haptic sensations. It’s a great experiment and during the video you can see one woman react quite unexpectedly to some strong notes in the classical music.

It’s nice to see CuteCircuit moving in the direction of tech for a cause as they already have beautiful compact design down. Although DIYers frequently explore Arduino as a solution for challenges faced by people, they often neglect the simple pleasures which can be enhanced, like listening to music. So, this project really is a delight because it focuses on something that all people want to enjoy. If you want to experiment with haptics relating to music, you should definitely check out this Instructable, which gives a great Arduino starter project. For a peek at the amazing work of CuteCircuit, check out our teardown on their Twirkle Shirt. It was one of the first out in the commercial ready-to-wear fashion world. Cheers to another great success by CuteCircuit and I hope the rest of you are inspired to help others through tech.


Flora breadboard is Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!


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