People’s gestural engagements with the textile, interpreted as a series of touched cross-sections of conductive thread, are passed to the Strings software to generate sound according to the performed gestures. As the textile is touched, stroked, and pressed, Strings encodes these gestures on different spatial and temporal scales, continuously generating sonic output that ranges from short, staccato bursts to expansive, harmonic sound fields based on people’s interaction.
The soundscape of Strings is generated utilising granular synthesis of pre-recorded samples of stringed instruments. A number of bodily engagement aspects like destination and duration of touch, spatial and temporal distance between successive touched points, overall or site-specific average activity over time, and non-activity intervals where mapped to specific synthesis destinations such as wave levels, pitches, size and speed of grains, sample displacement, tremolo speed and depth, and gain and channel masks. Each synthesis destination is related to distinct or combined physical interactions, and is set within a constrained range of values and timescale parameters. The outcome comes as an organic, non-predetermined soundscape that evolves over time in relation to people’s engagement with the textile interface. Strings soundscape is nuanced in time by the collaborative input of the people’s bodily responses to the tactile properties of the textile membrane.
