Sonic drapery as a folding metaphor for a wearable visualization and sonification display

摘要

This article examines two different multimodal interpretations of a folding metaphor, with folding understood as a richly interpretable communication medium. The authors look at the mythological origins of giving voice to fabrics and the tradition in drapery and arts of creating folds to signify embedded meanings. Their projects explore the intertextuality and intermodality of drapery (found originally in painting) as the context for sonic drapery or audification of material in motion and electronic music created from sounds of cloth, friction and permutations of textile sounds. This notion of folding representation is then transported into a contemporary pervasive computing context, as the second section of the article concerns the design and development of a novel wearable visualization and sonification display device. This display is able to sense and externalize environmental data about the wearer using a deliberately subtle and ambiguous representation metaphor.