This project brought together orchestra conducting, e-textile material studies, costume tailoring, low power computing and machine learning. We designed a wearable interactive system comprising of textile sensors embedded into a suit, low-power transmission and gesture recognition using creative computing tools. The project placed the conductor’s movements and personal performative expressiveness at the centre for technical and conceptual development.

The project was a two-month collaboration between the Verworner-Krause Kammerorchester (VKKO), the UdK Wearable Computing group, Prof. Felix Biessmann (Berliner Hochschule für Technik, ECDF) and Prof. Emmanuel Baccelli (Freie Universität, ECDF).

Results were published in

Greinke, B., Petri, G., Vierne, P., Biessmann, P., Börner, A., Schleiser, K., Baccelli, E., Krause, C., Verworner, C., & Biessmann, F. (2021). An Interactive Garment for Orchestra Conducting: IoT-enabled Textile & Machine Learning to Direct Musical Performance. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction.

Project team at UdK: Giorgia Petri (interaction design), Paul Biessmann (interaction design), Pauline Vierne (e-textiles), Alexandra Börner (garment).