Musical haptics is an emerging interdisciplinary field incorporating touch and proprioception in music scenarios from the perspectives of haptic engineering, human–computer interaction (HCI), applied psychology, musical acoustics, aesthetics, and music performance.
According to [1], whenever an acoustic or electroacoustic musical instrument produces sound, that comes from its vibrating components (e.g., the reed and air column in a clarinet, or the strings and soundboard of a piano). While performing on such instruments, the haptic channel is involved in a complex action–perception loop: The player physically interacts with the instrument, on the one hand, to generate sound by injecting energy in the form of forces, velocities, and displacements (e.g., striking the keys of a keyboard, or bowing, plucking, and pressing the strings of a violin), and on the other hand receiving and perceiving the instrument’s physical response (e.g., the instrument’s body vibration, the kinematic of keys being depressed, the resistance and vibration of strings). One could therefore assume that the haptic channel supports performance control (e.g., timing, intonation) as well as expressivity (e.g., timbre, emotion). In particular, skilled performers are known to establish a very intimate, rich haptic exchange with their instruments, resulting in truly embodied interaction that is hard to find in other human–machine contexts.
Music performance present a well-stablished framework to study basic psychophysical, perceptual, and biomechanical aspects of touch and proprioception, all of which may inform the design of novel haptic musical devices. There is now a growing research body of scientific studies of music performance and feelings or perception from which to inform research in musical haptics, including topics and methods from the fields of psychophysics, biomechanics, music education, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence.[2]
The goals of musical haptics research may be summarized as: (i) to understand the role of haptic interaction in music experience and instrumental performance, and (ii) to create new musical devices yielding meaningful haptic feedback.
One major drawbacks in the existing musical setups is unable to produce lower frequency base in the music. When someone experiences music into a club or concert, the feeling is completely different than experiencing it through a headphone. Music’s experience is beyond hearing and stimulation of cochlea. The feeling of tickling through the stomach and little tingling on the surface of whole skin endorses the feelings of total immersion. Musical haptics promises to deliver the feeling of a club to a person who wants to experience it without disturbing others. Assume the feeling of music while jogging in a public park or in a metro rail and that too with the complete base.
As a background, understanding haptics is necessary to design the musical haptics. Haptics has two aspects: tactile and kinesthetics. Tactile perception is a feeling of the stimulation of mechanoreceptors which lies in the dermis and epidermis layers of skin whereas kinesthetics is the proprioception (movement of muscles, limbs, fluids in the body). Music intend to stimulate both the categories: and to achieve that two different actuators are needed. To stimulate the mechanoreceptors, tactile actuators are used such as Linear resonance actuators (LRAs), Eccentric ring motors (ERMs) and piezo actuators. To stimulate the proprioception higher stimulation is required and bigger size tactile actuators are used.
Furthermore, both the performers and the audience are reached by vibration conveyed through air and solid media such as the floor and the seats of a concert hall. Those vibratory cues may then contribute to the perception of music (e.g., its perceived quality) and of instrumental performance (e.g., in an ensemble, a player could be able to monitor others’ performances also through such cues). These are the lost feelings when one jog in a park while putting a headphone. Haptics promises to bring these cues back to the people and contribute to the umwelt. Keep reading blogs in this series for the existing state of the art technologies, what is lacking in them and what future promises.
reference:
[1]. Papetti, Stefano, and Charalampos Saitis. Musical haptics. Springer Nature, 2018.
[2]. Berdahl, Edgar, Günter Niemeyer, and Julius O. Smith III. “Using Haptics to Assist Performers in Making Gestures to a Musical Instrument.” NIME. 2009.
To be Continued >>>
compossible umwelten 