Wearable Music

By suggesting playful interactions rather than mastery, the experiential poetics of “wearable music” offers a body-centric motivation alternative to normatively gendered and combative tropes that historically shape electronic music discourses. This page highlights projects I’ve led that explore collectively playable instruments in the context of performance practice (especially dance) and neurodiverse movement.

NSF CS4All | $1 million | 2021 - 2025

Project Title “Engaging Teachers and Neurodiverse Middle School Students in Tangible and Creative Computational Thinking Activities”

Students with disabilities, particularly those with autism, experience unequal outcomes in STEM education and employment. Despite frequently reported strengths and interests in STEM disciplines, individuals with autism often do not receive the support—those related to communication, transitions, and flexibility—needed to succeed. In working with teachers, parents, and employers, this project will create pathways to position students with autism spectrum disorder for success in school and also the larger community.

The project is based on embodied learning and cooperative learning approaches that inform the team’s development of Telematic Embodied Learning (TEL) activities: activities that engage participants in using movement and their bodies to understand concepts, and can be conducted in hybrid or remote teaching situations when students and teachers are in different locations.

Introduction video to the networked collaboration portion of the NEWMT online curriculum (narrated by Seth Thorn).

Browser-based instruments that link to wearable BLE MIDI sensors: https://playnewmt.github.io/app

Wearable Music Workshopping | Collectively Playable Instruments

These movers are instrumented with absolute orientation sensors worn on the right shoulder. Individual and collective features drive a set of custom particle synthesizers.

A concise, improv-based score using the mare vaporum instrument created by Seth Thorn. Intensive collective movement filters and attenuates the master audio bus. Movement direction by Halley Willcox.

Solo Instruments | Experiential Design

Experimental movement / wearable / music work by Halley Willcox (Movement) and Seth Thorn (Sound and Sensing).

M4L module demo that looks at time intervals between sensor zero-crossings and analyzes for variance. Low variances causes a control signal to rise, which is mapped to reverb, pitch-shift and tremolo effects.

Experimental mapping of wrist sensor: processed viola samples mapped to differential spatial fields and accumulation processes.

Experimental mapping of wrist sensor: particle synthesis (glisson, pulsar, granular) with amplitude convolution of composed loop.

Custom Hardware Kits

Shows the process of a constructing a sensor using an Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi development board, an absolute orientation sensor based on a Bosch BNO055, and haptic feedback with a disc motor and NPN transistor.