A New Sensor Technology for the Sonification Of Proximity and Touch in Closed-Loop Auditory Interaction

The Italian word sentire [senˈtiːre] means both to hear and to feel. What if one could “hear” closeness or distance to another person? The paper presents a new sensor technology for sonifying proximity and touch which we have developed for Sentire, a digital system that mediates between bodily movements and musical sounds. Using this technology, inter-body proximity and touch can be sensed wirelessly and mapped to an algorithmic sound environment in real time, allowing for a closed-loop auditory interaction between two or more people in a physical environment. We describe its iterative and incremental development within the interdisciplinary research project “Social interaction through sound feedback–Sentire,” which combines (artistic) human-computer interaction, sonic interaction design and real-world research. The prototype and its underlying sensor technology—based on electro-quasistatic coupling—have been successfully used in couple therapy, serving as both a framework for usability testing and to investigate the relationship between sound, sociality and therapy.