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Imagine never being able to hear music clearly your entire life. Now imagine changing all that by simply sitting in a chair. The Emoti-Chair is a cross-modal, audio-tactile display chair that allows deaf or hard of hearing people to feel the vibrations of music and sound. Created by two Ryerson professors and their associates, the Emoti-Chair is currently on display until Jan. 15, 2009 at the Ontario Science Centre as part of the special exhibition, On Thin Ice: Youth Respond to International Polar Year.

The Emoti-Chair is an interdisciplinary project developed by Deborah Fels, Director of the Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT) and Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management; Frank Russo, Director of the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) lab and Assistant Professor in Ryerson’s Department of Psychology; Ted Rogers School of Management postdoctoral fellow Maria Karam; and Dr. Fels’ associate, independent artist, Graham Smith. The chair is part of Ryerson’s Alternative Sensory Information Display (ASID), a project geared towards exploring alternative methods for presenting sensory information to users who are deaf or hard of hearing.

“It’s amazing to see what happens when people from many different disciplines work together to create something so fantastic,” President Levy said. “The Emoti-Chair is a great example of Ryerson’s interdisciplinary and innovative research coming to life.”

“Cutting-edge research and practical results are what puts Ryerson ahead of the pack,” said Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. “Our research momentum continues to build, placing Ryerson at the forefront of groundbreaking ventures.”

Aided by a computer, the tactile display on the chair translates music and sound into movement. Whether it be rocking or vibrations, the music can be heard through the movement of the chair, expressing to the person sitting, the emotion heard in sound.

“We had been working on multimodal access to entertainment for people with disabilities for the past five years but had focused on visualization techniques. We wanted to explore alternative media, specifically vibration,” Dr. Fels said. “At the moment, the chairs are early prototypes. To commercialize these chairs, they must undergo a re-engineering process to make them robust, reliable, and easily and cheaply manufactured.”

Dr. Karam developed the ideas in the original proposal, developing and evaluating the theoretical model that is being used to drive the design of the chair. Dr. Russo and his students at the SMART lab are extensively involved in designing and carrying out various evaluations to build the theoretical and human-computer interaction models.

“We are testing the hypothesis that emotional aspects of music can be ‘translated’ across modalities. The collaboration with Dr. Fels and the CLT provides an exciting vehicle for seeing the theory and findings through in the chair,” Dr. Russo said.

Ellen Hibbard, a PhD candidate in Ryerson’s Communications and Culture program who researches at the CLT, said the chair helps deaf people understand why other people are emotionally moved by music, both on its own and in film and television.

“The first time I used the chair, I was blown away by the amount of information I could get about music from the vibrations,” Hibbard said. “For the first time in my life, I could feel sad or happy because of how the music vibrations felt on my skin. I never felt those kinds of feelings before when music was played. It was how the chair ‘played’ the music that enabled me to have a shared experience with people who are emotionally moved by listening to music.”

courtesy of Sarah Hayward

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