The paper Pain Creature by Madaghiele and Demir presents an innovative interdisciplinary project combining textile design, sonic interaction, and dance to create an embodied textile instrument. The artifact, Pain Creature, serves as both a reflective tool for chronic pain experiences and a performance instrument.
The paper highlights a successful collaboration between a sonic interaction designer (Madaghiele) and a textile designer (Demir), merging expertise in sound, textiles, and movement. This approach led to a design where material properties directly influenced sound interactions.
Through the use of soma design method, including first-person exploration of chronic pain, the designers translated subjective pain experiences into tangible textile-sound mappings.
The artifact was integrated into an improvisational dance performance, where it functioned as a “parasitic” extension of the dancer’s body, narrating stages of pain. Through this approach, the artifact bridges materiality, sound and movement and offers the audience a richt, multi-sensory experience.
As far as I understand the Bela Mini’s computational constrains forced the designers to constrain the sound design to simpler forms, e.g. omitting the Empty dimension. This highlights a trade-off between complexity and real-time performance limitations. Another critical aspect that was missing in the paper was the effectiveness of the mappings on the audience and how well they were perceived. While the paper notes the importance of gesture-sound mappings for audience understanding, no empirical evaluation of this took place.
As the Bela Mini offers limited dynamic control over musical parameters, the performance could also get stale the longer the performance goes on. With the implication of a live performing musician this could be negated, but the risk of loosing the connection between gesture-sound mapping through a diluted soundscape is very high.
This paper in my eyes documents a novel, interdisciplinary design process and its theoretical grounding in somaesthetics. However, it could be strengthened by implementing audience studies to evaluate how performers and audiences interpret the instrument’s mappings and how much difference it makes compared to a pre-recorded soundscape. I also would love to know how the design would evolve with more advanced textile instruments. Unfortunately, the PD patch documentation is very limited which hinders fellow designers to reproduce the Artifact.
