Abstract
Soul Song Sensorium examines the negotiation between performer, technologist, and technology in the co-creation of a sound-driven wearable instrument. Initially imagined as a system translating gesture and voice into live sonic layers, the project evolved through iterative exchanges between what the performer envisioned, what was technically achievable, and what emerged unpredictably in practice. The technology frequently acted as a third actor whose behaviours, limitations, and resistances shaped both creative intention and aesthetic outcome. Rather than progressing through linear feature accumulation, the work advanced through attunement—paring back complexity, refining mappings, and learning to work with the system’s tendencies. Through this process, the Sensorium became a sonic boundary object mediating between embodied practice, technical design, and artistic interpretation. Our analysis identifies six interrelated themes characterising this negotiation: intention to attunement, listening as translation, technology as co-performer, evolving design threads, costume and space as ecology, and embodied co-authorship.
Keywords
boundary objects, sound-driven design, human-computer interaction, performative research
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1937
Citation
Ward, A., and Taylor, J. (2026) Performer, Technologist, Machine: Co-Creating the Soul Song Sensorium, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1937
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Performer, Technologist, Machine: Co-Creating the Soul Song Sensorium
Soul Song Sensorium examines the negotiation between performer, technologist, and technology in the co-creation of a sound-driven wearable instrument. Initially imagined as a system translating gesture and voice into live sonic layers, the project evolved through iterative exchanges between what the performer envisioned, what was technically achievable, and what emerged unpredictably in practice. The technology frequently acted as a third actor whose behaviours, limitations, and resistances shaped both creative intention and aesthetic outcome. Rather than progressing through linear feature accumulation, the work advanced through attunement—paring back complexity, refining mappings, and learning to work with the system’s tendencies. Through this process, the Sensorium became a sonic boundary object mediating between embodied practice, technical design, and artistic interpretation. Our analysis identifies six interrelated themes characterising this negotiation: intention to attunement, listening as translation, technology as co-performer, evolving design threads, costume and space as ecology, and embodied co-authorship.