Project

3 Voices: A Soft-Robotic Opera Transposing Singing Experience Across the Audience

Theodor Gadler 

3 Voices is an artistic research project that looks beyond conventional approaches of listening to music, and instead probes at the deeper listening potential of bodies as conductive and resonant objects in their own right.

As a testing ground for the project, we reimagined Morton Feldman’s 1982 vocal work Three Voices. In this project, we have reframed the voices in Feldman’s piece, making them tangible, touchable and transferable through the use of our soft robotic fabrics that provide nuanced, multimodal haptic feedback to the body that resembles a singer’s upper body thoracic expansions, contractions and laryngeal vibrations. 

Our dreams for expanding this research work encompass further explorations in how on-body or in-body sensing systems could capture the somatic experience of singing, or dancing bodies, and transfer this experience onto another person’s body through actuation.