Concert For The Deaf Showcases New Technology

By Steve McLean

Emoti-Chair

Photo by Colin McConnell/Toronto Star

A project first launched to help deaf and hard of hearing people more fully appreciate music, background sounds and tone of voice in movies and television shows was set to be taken to a nightclub on March 5 in a concert catered specifically to people with little or no hearing.

Ryerson University's Centre of Learning Technology and The Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology Lab presented the show at Toronto's Clinton's Tavern to show the progress made over the past two years by its Alternative Sensory Information Displays project.

"It's really hard to get across Beethoven's sonata by putting a musical graphic on a screen," says researcher Carmen Branje. "That only goes so far, so we started looking toward our other senses."

Since smell and taste were more difficult to deal with, they elected to focus on touch, which planted the seed for what has now become known as the Emoti-Chair, which translates and reproduces audio frequencies. All of the computer-controlled chairs have strategically placed speakers on them, with those amplifying low notes placed near the bottom and those with higher notes near the top so people in the chair can feel the differences between sounds. A larger chair also vibrates and shoots air jets to coincide with the sounds to further enhance the experience and give people an appreciation of music they've never had before.

"We ran an experiment to see if people could determine whether a song that was felt but not heard was happy or sad, and there is an ability to do that," explains Branje. "Lately we've done some work that shows that people are able to distinguish timbres."

"They could distinguish an A that's played on a violin from an A that's played on a trumpet. They're the same frequency and the same note, but they're able to distinguish the differences between them."

"When I'm sitting in the chair and the chair is producing distinct vibrations for different components of music, I feel like I'm getting more information about music than I could just by my sense of touch alone," said Ellen Hibbard, a deaf Ryerson PhD student who tried the Emoti-Chair, in a Toronto Star article last July. "When the vibrations are fast-paced and irregular, it makes me feel anxious but when the vibrations are strong, even and slow, it makes me feel relaxed and think of my own heart beating."

The Emoti-Chairs are still in the prototype stage and, since they're not being mass-produced, are expensive. Branje says the biggest and most complex chair costs about $10,000, but he thinks that scaled-down models could sell for around $1,000. He envisions them in movie theatres and concert halls.

So does Andrew Shropshire of the band Fox Jaws, one of the groups taking part in the March 5 concert. He acknowledges that the show is a special event and says Emoti-Chairs might not be practical for nightclubs, but thinks they'd work well in larger, more formal concert venues that have more space and where they can "afford the overhead."

Sign language interpreters and monitors with captions on them were to be used so people could understand lyrics at the Clinton's show, and Shropshire says the band would likely pay more attention to the visual aspect of their performance, but he didn't anticipate "doing anything terribly out of the ordinary."

Others, however, are looking at the Emoti-Chair to open up new opportunities. Toronto-based techno artist Stephane "Teknostep" Vera, who was slated to perform a DJ set on March 5, has been composing music specifically for vibrations for the chair with an eye toward future concerts featuring a number of them.

The concert, a fundraiser for the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf, was also set to mark the introduction of Music Viz. This music visualization software helps deaf or hard of hearing people to visualize music by seeing beats that appear on a screen that can enable them to experience the rhythm, tempo and flow of the songs being played.