Your Clothing Can Now Be An Instrument With E-Textiles

The musical world has a wide range of musical instruments, and clever musicians make use of them every day, but what if your clothing could be an instrument as well? Imagine the performance possibilities, as all you’d need to do is touch a part of your clothing to make sounds similar to a normal ridged instrument. Researchers Sophie Skach and Victor Shepardson of Intelligent Instruments Lab in Iceland are currently pursuing next-gen “E-textiles” with the idea of making musical clothing a reality.

While contacts and hard interfaces to music gear have been built into clothing for some time, the idea here is to design an instrument that’s warm and soft, two things that are important during those long Icelandic winters.

According to DesignBoom, E-textiles can function as touchscreens, interact with digital devices, be incorporated into traditional musical instruments, and even be connected to external digital devices for music creation and mixing. “As such, they are able to act as gestural touch interfaces and can step into a conversation with digital tools,” the website stated. 

The current prototype E-textiles can be used to manipulate audio in various ways, such as stretching, squeezing, and stroking the material. That said, it seems like a major barrier to adoption would be to stop the clothing from inadvertent triggering, which could be distracting in the least and embarrassing under certain circumstances.

To me, this is the kind of thing that seems far out now that someone will find a use for that no one ever thought of before. Many times instruments that seem rather corny on their own can become iconic in the hands of someone creative, like the electro-theremin on “Good Vibrations” or the Stylophone on “Space Oddity.”

Even better, I foresee this as something that could finally keep a lead singer who doesn’t know what to do with their hands occupied. That’s so much better than an out-of-time tambourine!

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