Description

This workshop will explore the expanding role of haptic and tactile perception in shaping how we interact with sound, technology, and each other. Bringing together perspectives from neuroscience, human–computer interaction, and digital musical instrument design, this session will highlight how touch can augment perception, support learning, foster inclusivity, and enable new forms of creative expression through talks and demonstrations.

Registration

This event is free and open to the public with registration. Please fill out this MS form to register.

Program

9:00am–12:00pm: Talks
12:00–1:00pm: Demos

Ziyue Piao – Music Learning with Haptics: Internal Awareness, Motor Control, and Collaborative Metaphor

Traditional music pedagogy often fails to convey "invisible" sensations like muscle tension and breath control. This talk explores how haptics enhances embodied music learning by externalizing internal awareness via wearables, supporting motor control through force feedback, and facilitating collaborative metaphor in teacher-student communication. By integrating these dimensions through multimodal systems like MappEMG, we transform physiological signals into shared tactile experiences. Ultimately, I envision haptics as a novel communication channel that empowers musicians to master the "felt" nuances of performance.

Ilja Frissen – Thinking inside the box

Humans can acquire behaviorally relevant information about the contents of a container through their sense of touch. A container poses an interesting challenge to the haptic sense as it creates an intermediary between its contents and the observer. In this talk I will present an overview of my work on “container haptics”; people’s ability to make reliable inferences about the content of a container by means of the sense of touch alone.

Etienne Abassi – Enhancing Music Perception Through Auditory-Vibrotactile Training

Hearing loss can impair the brain’s ability to reconstruct auditory scenes, while current rehabilitation devices often fail to convey the fine acoustic details essential for perceiving complex sounds such as music. I will present a study evaluating a multichannel vibrotactile glove that maps sound onto finger vibrations to support auditory perception. In a music-in-noise task, we found that auditory–tactile stimulation improved performance and enhanced neural encoding, particularly after training, suggesting vibrotactile feedback as a promising approach for improving music and speech perception.
This talk will be accompanied by a demonstration of the vibrotactile glove.

Vincent Levesque – Creating compelling haptic user experiences through human perception

This talk will discuss several research projects that leverage knowledge of human perception to create compelling haptic devices and user experiences. Examples will include the use of lateral skin stretch to create a miniature tactile array for the fingertip, as well as the use of vibrotactile granular synthesis to accentuate the bending of a flexible device.
This talk will be accompanied by a demonstration of moving waves on the Latero tactile array.

Edu Meneses – Collective Haptic Experiences

Our presentation on Collective Haptic Experiences explores the emerging paradigm of multi-user tactile feedback. We will examine the end-to-end pipeline for creating and deploying such experiences on state-of-the-art devices, such as the SAT's Plancher Haptique, with a focus on design, authoring, and visual representation.

Danilo Pesevic – Reviving an Open-Source Haptic Module

The TorqueTuner (2020) is a rotary force-feedback module that facilitates straightforward haptic integration into DMIs. Since 2022, the project has transitioned away from the obsolete Mechaduino servo platform, however with increased hardware costs and integration complexity. My project revives the affordable Mechaduino-based TorqueTuner through a hardware redesign and firmware update, thereby reducing the barrier to entry for DMI haptics. In this presentation, I will discuss project motivations, present the redesign results, and provide recommendations for sustainable music technology development.
This talk will be accompanied by a demonstration.