A professor has helped make music for the deaf by inventing a chair that allows deaf people to feel music through vibrations.
Frank Russo, a psychology professor, worked with a team of researchers to invent the chair, called the “emoti-chair”, and worked with both deaf and hearing musicians to compose music that focuses on vibrations and vision rather than sound.
Prof. Russo, a music cognition expert, will be discussing music without sound at the TEDx Talks Conference in Toronto, on Thursday. The conference’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.”
Russo talks about there being a long history of the deaf experiencing music through vibration and deaf culture being extremely visual and involving the body.
He said: “Their experience of music, maybe not surprisingly, is informed by what they see and what they feel. There’s this long history of feeling music. For example, there’s a famous percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. She’s deaf and she talks about experiencing music through her body. So she’ll perform without shoes so that she can feel the vibration through her body.”
The emoti-chair is a sensory substitution technology that’s designed to take sound and present it to the body as vibration. You can put your hand on a speaker and feel the vibration because all sound emanates from some form of vibration.
“The challenge though, with touching a speaker or even touching a musical instrument is what we call perceptual masking. Perceptual masking occurs in vibration when the lower frequency vibrations dominate the higher frequency vibrations. So all we feel is the thump, thump, thump.”
“What we’ve done in the emoti-chair is separate out the frequencies and present them to different parts of the body. We’ll take the high frequencies and we’ll present them to the upper part of the back. We’ll take the lower frequencies in the music signal and we’ll present them to the lower part of your back,” he added.
FAMOUS DEAF MUSICIANS
- Beethoven
- Shawn Dale Barnett
- Michael Bolton
- Evelyn Glennie
