Musical Haptics
Creating music is a rich multisensory experience that engages both hearing and touch as we interact with an instrument. Haptic feedback, such as force-feedback and vibrations, can significantly enhance the musical experience by deepening immersion, evoking emotional responses, improving expressive control, and aiding in the structural understanding of musical elements like rhythm.
We compared the similarities and differences between the auditory and tactile sense and applied this knowledge in the design of new instrument prototypes.
Dr. Sebastian Merchel, born in 1980, is a researcher at the Chair of Acoustics and Haptics at TU Dresden. He studied electrical engineering and acoustics at TU Dresden and Aalborg University in Denmark. He wrote his doctoral thesis on “Auditory-Tactile Music Perception.” His main areas of interest are multimodal perception and spatial audio. He also works intensively with analog and digital musical instruments and the transfer of scientific knowledge into practical applications.