BigShinyThing

Here at BST we normally can’t be bothered with wearable tech as it tends to be, well, a bit unwearable and downright ugly. However, a singing dress sounded like too poetic a proposition to ignore.

The sonic fabric feels a bit like flexible plastic tarp, and is durable and hand-washable. According to a recent Wired profile, “Santoro’s work has drawn lots of oohs and aahs, and is making waves in the design world.”

Santoro came up with the idea back in 2001 when she used strands of cassette tape to determine the direction of the wind, combining the idea of wind-activated prayers on Tibetan prayer flags with her childhood love of sailing. She says, “As a kid I would imagine I could hear sound coming off the tape if the wind hit it the right way.” She knitted a pre-recorded tape into potholder-shaped prototypes by hand and later used a commercial loom which cassette tape fitted into perfectly. Soon she began weaving tape with cotton to make a fabric.

Then another artist suggested running a Walkman tape head over the fabric. They extracted a sound piece from the walkman and mounted it on a block of wood. Moving it across the fabric, they could hear the mixed up noise of five tracks of sound. Sartoro says “it sounds kind of like scratching a record backward. It’s pretty garbled.”

Santoro’s current creations play 20 tracks at once. She creates sound collages on a four track (of course) and the reader picks up five strands at a time. Her dresses are now no mere artistic conceit: she’s worked with other designers to create a dress for the drummer of Phish, which he ‘played’ in concert, and brands such as Target and Nissan are interested in her invention. Santoro also has heady ambitions for her sonic clothing: she hopes to make fabrics that can play individual sounds and is also working with another artists to develop a more compact fabric reader. To her, the dress has the potential to become a kind of immersive iPod: “the most important part is being able to walk around in your favourite music or sound.”

File under interesting stuff to do with redundant media formats. Story via Wired. There is also an interview with Santoro on SkyNoise which also covers her involvement in the ‘Center for the Obvious Campaign to Replace the Dial-tone with OM’. Via Extreme Craft.