Ztretch – Stretchy Fabric as a Music Controller by Angela Chang: There has been much prior research on integrating electronics into textiles. However, I felt that many of these projects did not take into account the usability and interactivity of the fabric. Much of the prior work is focused on rigid, exact places for touching the fabric, rather than supporting the many actions our hands and bodies can create. Thus, I wanted to make a device that could capture the richness of active touch interactions. These haptic interactions could be used to create expressive music. Here is are 2 videos of a performance fabric.avi (100Mb) and fabric2.avi (100Mb download).

“ABSTRACT: We present Zstretch, a textile music controller that supports expressive haptic interactions. The musical controller takes advantage of the fabric’s topological constraints to enable proportional control of musical parameters.

Typical interactions with fabric involve (a) grasping and pulling, (b) scrunching and (c) twisting

This novel interface explores ways in which one might treat music as a sheet of cloth. This paper proposes an approach to engage simple technologies for supporting ordinary hand interactions. We show that this combination of basic technology with general tactile movements can result in an expressive musical interface.” Chang, A. and Ishii, H. Zstretch: A stretchy fabric controller. Presented at NIME [PDF] [via Architectradure]