Designing Empowering Vocal and Tangible Interaction

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-experience, andcommunication and relational possibilities. They gradually become moreimportant for Interaction Design, due to increased development of tangibleinteraction and mobile communication. In this paper we present and discuss ourwork with voice and tangible interaction in our ongoing research project XXXXX.The goal is to improve health for families, adults and children withdisabilities through use of collaborative, musical, tangible media. We build onuse of voice in Music Therapy and on a humanistic health approach. Ourchallenge is to design vocal and tangible interactive media that through usereduce isolation and passivity and increase empowerment for the users. We usesound recognition, generative sound synthesis, vibrations and cross-mediatechniques, to create rhythms, melodies and harmonic chords to stimulatebody-voice connections, positive emotions and structures for actions.