Sensory Chairs: A System for Biosignal Research and Performance

Music and sound have the power to provoke strong emotional and physical responses within us. Although concepts such as emotion can be hard to quantify in a scientific manner there has been significant research into how the brain and body respond to music. However much of this research has been carried out in clinical, laboratory type conditions with intrusive or cumbersome monitoring devices. Technological augmentation of low-tech objects can increase their functionality, but may n ecessitate a form of context awareness from those objects. Biosignal monitoring allows these enhanced artefacts to gauge physical responses and from these extrapolate our emotions. In this paper a system is outlined, in which a number of chairs in a concert hall environment were embedded with biosignal sensors allowing monitoring of audience reaction to a performance, or control of electronic equipment to create a biosignal-driven performance. This type of affective computing represents an exciting area of growth for interactive technology and potential applications for ‘affect aware’ devices are proposed.