whilD gloves
A wearable music synthesizer and instrument for dancers. The user can produces music while performing physically such dance or an act. The idea is to make the music production more intuitive with respect to performance from the performer point of view. Actions like tapping, snapping, rubbing and sliding two fingers are mapped to various synthesizing techniques.
The first glove (instrument glove)is built from just conductive threads running along the fingers and a microcontroller running custom synthesis firmware, the system treats the performer's skin and finger movements as its primary input surface. The work sits at the intersection of physical computing, instrument design, and choreographic practice, asking what it means to compose while dancing.
The main idea is to create a interface for dancers to produce a structural music rather than random music generated based on the sensor data and also not being a distraction to the dancers.
The dancer produces music as they perform, but the moment the music is produced, their mind & body responses to the music that was just produced from their intuition, which again creates music, creating an interesting loop weaved of music and dance together.
Flamenco & tap dancing are some of the dance forms where music is produced simultaneously, and I wanted to investigate if there is a possibility to stretch the margin of music-dance embodiment in a new way using contemporary technologies.