The Body Hears
Accessibility
Embodied Interaction
Digital Media
Installation
What happens to music when hearing isn’t the only way in?
Music has always been something you either hear or miss. As a hard-of-hearing designer, I started from my own experience , where captions and devices translate music for you, but never let you feel it as you. The goal isn't to replace sound. It's to give music a body.
My Role
Design & Research (solo thesis)
Timeline
Sep 2025 - Present
Industry
Accessibility & Assistive Technology, Music & Sound
Tools
Arduino, TouchDesigner, pneumatic actuators, silicone casting, haptic motors
dissertation
Research
"I can't always hear music. That doesn't mean I should be excluded from it."
The project grew into a year-long investigation with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing collaborators through interviews, participatory workshops, and repeated prototype sessions. Across nine participants, sensory strategies varied widely, some leaned on visual and tactile cues, others stayed closer to residual hearing. No single approach fit everyone.
"This is the first time someone asked me where I feel music, not just whether I can hear it."
Participants often rely on other senses to engage with music, and different parts of the body perceive different tactile input .
Co-Design workshop
Blind of materials, sound to visual, ideation prototype
Co-Design workshop
Body mapping
mapping logic
"Low bass, I feel it — that's joy. But I can't feel the emotion in it."
Co-design workshop findings showed that bodily preference is spatially differentiated rather than neutral. Participants tended to prefer the upper body, especially the upper back, for stronger vibration and rhythmic sensation, while hands and arms were more often associated with grounded and calm tactile experiences. This suggests that body placement should not be treated as interchangeable, but as an important part of how music is translated and felt through the body.
RHYTHM → PULSE
An upper-back wearable turns beats into tactile rhythm
EMOTION → PRESSURE
A pneumatic hand piece holds sustained continuity
TEXTURE → LIGHT
Visuals translate sonic atmosphere into a shared layer
Prototyping meant learning
The prototypes in this project were never meant to be final answers. Each one was a way of asking a new question: how does rhythm feel? How much pressure reads as emotion, and how much reads as noise? All of them taught me something the research alone couldn't done which is understanding embodied music access means building, testing, and rebuilding it, not just describing it.
Journal↗
Material prototypes generated from workshop
"If you removed the haptic feedback, it would be a different project entirely: one about sound or visuals, not about touch."
The silhouette radiates outward from the neck and shoulders echoing the way a single beat doesn't stay in one place, but ripples through the body. Each layer of the pattern marks a ripple of the same pulse, overlapping, the way real rhythm doesn't arrive as a single clean beat, but as waves that blend into each other.
"Emotion doesn't pulse. It builds, holds, and releases"
A pneumatic wrist piece translates sustained musical tension into slow, breathing pressure
"Light needs its own language, not a single look."
“It is not a hearing aid. It is an instrument for different kinds of listening.”
