Modelling Perceptual Elements of Music in a Vibrotactile Display for Deaf Users: A Field Study

The model human cochlea (MHC) is a sensory substitution technique for presenting music as multiple discrete channels of vibrotactile stimuli. The MHC prototype was introduced to a group of deaf senior citizens at a community centre, where they could try the chair, and provide us with feedback about their experience. Preliminary results from this work suggest that the MHC can potentially offer a more effective means of expressing basic emotional information from music in a vibrotactile display when the signals more closely match the perceptual elements of the music such as melody and instrument parts. We describe the MHC prototype and present the results of our field study, which extends our lab experiments with the MHC to include deaf and hard of hearing participants in a real world setting.