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Presented at CHI 2012, Touché is a capacitive system for pervasive, continuous sensing. Among other amazing capabilities, it can accurately sense gestures a user makes on his own body. “It is conceivable that one day mobile devices could have no screens or buttons, and rely exclusively on the body as the input surface.” Touché.

Noticing that many of the same sensors, silicon, and batteries used in smartphones are being used to create smarter artificial limbs, Fast Company draws the conclusion that the market for smartphones is driving technology development useful for bionics. While interesting enough, the article doesn’t continue to the next logical and far more interesting possibility: that phones themselves are becoming parts of our bodies. To what extent are smartphones already bionic organs, and how could we tell if they were? I’m actively researching design in this area – stay tuned for more about the body-incorporated phone.

A study provides evidence that talking into a person’s right ear can affect behavior more effectively than talking into the left.

One of the best known asymmetries in humans is the right ear dominance for listening to verbal stimuli, which is believed to reflect the brain’s left hemisphere superiority for processing verbal information.

I heavily prefer my left ear for phone calls. So much so that I have trouble understanding people on the phone when I use my right ear. Should I be concerned that my brain seems to be inverted?

Read on and it becomes clear that going beyond perceptual psychology, the scientists are terrifically shrewd:

Tommasi and Marzoli’s three studies specifically observed ear preference during social interactions in noisy night club environments. In the first study, 286 clubbers were observed while they were talking, with loud music in the background. In total, 72 percent of interactions occurred on the right side of the listener. These results are consistent with the right ear preference found in both laboratory studies and questionnaires and they demonstrate that the side bias is spontaneously displayed outside the laboratory.

In the second study, the researchers approached 160 clubbers and mumbled an inaudible, meaningless utterance and waited for the subjects to turn their head and offer either their left of their right ear. They then asked them for a cigarette. Overall, 58 percent offered their right ear for listening and 42 percent their left. Only women showed a consistent right-ear preference. In this study, there was no link between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear receiving the request.

In the third study, the researchers intentionally addressed 176 clubbers in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they spoke to the clubbers’ right ear compared with their left.

I’m picturing the scientists using their grant money to pay cover at dance clubs and try to obtain as many cigarettes as possible – carefully collecting, then smoking, their data – with the added bonus that their experiment happens to require striking up conversation with clubbers of the opposite sex who are dancing alone. One assumes that, if the test subject happened to be attractive, once the cigarette was obtained (or not) the subject was invited out onto the terrace so the scientist could explain the experiment and his interesting line of work. Well played!

Another MRI study, this time investigating how we learn parts of speech:

The test consisted of working out the meaning of a new term based on the context provided in two sentences. For example, in the phrase “The girl got a jat for Christmas” and “The best man was so nervous he forgot the jat,” the noun jat means “ring.” Similarly, with “The student is nising noodles for breakfast” and “The man nised a delicious meal for her” the hidden verb is “cook.”

“This task simulates, at an experimental level, how we acquire part of our vocabulary over the course of our lives, by discovering the meaning of new words in written contexts,” explains Rodríguez-Fornells. “This kind of vocabulary acquisition based on verbal contexts is one of the most important mechanisms for learning new words during childhood and later as adults, because we are constantly learning new terms.”

The participants had to learn 80 new nouns and 80 new verbs. By doing this, the brain imaging showed that new nouns primarily activate the left fusiform gyrus (the underside of the temporal lobe associated with visual and object processing), while the new verbs activated part of the left posterior medial temporal gyrus (associated with semantic and conceptual aspects) and the left inferior frontal gyrus (involved in processing grammar).

This last bit was unexpected, at first. I would have guessed that verbs would be learned in regions of the brain associated with motor action. But according to this study, verbs seem to be learned only as grammatical concepts. In other words, knowledge of what it means to run is quite different than knowing how to run. Which makes sense if verb meaning is accessed by representational memory rather than declarative memory.

Researchers at the University of Tampere in Finland found that,

Interfaces that vibrate soon after we click a virtual button (on the order of tens of milliseconds) and whose vibrations have short durations are preferred. This combination simulates a button with a “light touch” – one that depresses right after we touch it and offers little resistance.

Users also liked virtual buttons that vibrated after a longer delay and then for a longer subsequent duration. These buttons behaved like ones that require more force to depress.

This is very interesting. When we think of multimodal feedback needing to make cognitive sense, synchronization first comes to mind. But there are many more synesthesias in our experience that can only be uncovered through careful reflection. To make an interface feel real, we must first examine reality.

Researchers at the Army Research Office developed a vibrating belt with eight mini actuators — “tactors” — that signify all the cardinal directions. The belt is hooked up to a GPS navigation system, a digital compass and an accelerometer, so the system knows which way a soldier is headed even if he’s lying on his side or on his back.

The tactors vibrate at 250 hertz, which equates to a gentle nudge around the middle. Researchers developed a sort of tactile morse code to signify each direction, helping a soldier determine which way to go, New Scientist explains. A soldier moving in the right direction will feel the proper pattern across the front of his torso. A buzz from the front, side and back tactors means “halt,” a pulsating movement from back to front means “move out,” and so on.

A t-shirt design by Derek Eads.

Recent research reveals some fun facts about aural-tactile synesthesia:

Both hearing and touch, the scientists pointed out, rely on nerves set atwitter by vibration. A cell phone set to vibrate can be sensed by the skin of the hand, and the phone’s ring tone generates sound waves — vibrations of air — that move the eardrum…

A vibration that has a higher or lower frequency than a sound… tends to skew pitch perception up or down. Sounds can also bias whether a vibration is perceived.

The ability of skin and ears to confuse each other also extends to volume… A car radio may sound louder to a driver than his passengers because of the shaking of the steering wheel. “As you make a vibration more intense, what people hear seems louder,” says Yau. Sound, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to change how intense vibrations feel.

Max Mathews, electronic music pioneer, has died.

Though computer music is at the edge of the avant-garde today, its roots go back to 1957, when Mathews wrote the first version of “Music,” a program that allowed an IBM 704 mainframe computer to play a 17-second composition. He quickly realized, as he put it in a 1963 article in Science, “There are no theoretical limits to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds.”

Rest in peace, Max.

UPDATE: I haven’t updated this blog in a while, and I realized after posting this that my previous post was about the 2010 Modulations concert. Max Mathews played at Modulations too, and that was the last time I saw him.

I finally got around to recording and mastering the set I played at the CCRMA Modulations show a few months back. Though I’ve been a drum and bass fan for many years, this year’s Modulations was the first time I’d mixed it for others. Hope you like it!

Modulations 2010
Drum & Bass | 40:00 | May 2010

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1. Excision — System Check
2. Randomer — Synth Geek
3. Noisia — Deception
4. Bassnectar — Teleport Massive (Bassnectar Remix)
5. Moving Fusion, Shimon, Ant Miles — Underbelly
6. Brookes Brothers — Crackdown
7. The Ian Carey Project — Get Shaky (Matrix & Futurebound’s Nip & Tuck Mix)
8. Netsky — Eyes Closed
9. Camo & Krooked — Time Is Ticking Away feat. Shaz Sparks

Over the last few days this video has been so much bombshell to many of my music-prone friends.

It’s called the Multi-Touch Light Table and it was created by East Bay-based artist/fidget-house DJ Gregory Kaufman. The video is beautifully put together, highlighting the importance of presentation when documenting new ideas.

I really like some of the interaction ideas presented in the video. Others, I’m not so sure about. But that’s all right: the significance of the MTLT is that it’s the first surface-based DJ tool that systematically accounts for the needs of an expert user.

Interestingly, even though it looks futuristic and expensive to us, interfaces like this will eventually be the most accessible artistic tools. Once multi-touch surface are ubiquitous, the easiest way to gain some capability will be to use inexpensive or open-source software. The physical interfaces created for DJing, such as Technics 1200s, are prosthetic objects (as are musical instruments), and will remain more expensive because mechanical contraptions will always be. Now, that isn’t to say that in the future our interfaces won’t evolve to become digital, networked, and multi-touch sensitive, or even that their physicality will be replaced with a digital haptic display. But one of the initial draws of the MTLT—the fact of its perfectly flat, clean interactive surface—seems exotic to us right now, and in the near future it will be default.

Check out this flexible interface called impress. Flexible displays just look so organic and, well impressive. One day these kinds of surface materials will become viable displays and they’ll mark a milestone in touch computing.

It’s natural to stop dancing between songs. The beat changes, the sub-rhythms reorient themselves, a new hook is presented and a new statement is made. But stopping dancing between songs is undesirable. We wish to lose ourselves in as many consecutive moments as possible. The art of mixing music is to fulfill our desire to dance along to continuous excellent music, uninterrupted for many minutes (or, in the best case, many hours) at a time. (Even if we don’t explicitly move our bodies to the music, when we listen our minds are dancing; the same rules apply.)

I don’t remember what prompted me to take that note, but it was probably not that the mixing was especially smooth.



A tomato hailing from Capay, California.

LHCSound is a site where you can listen to sonified data from the Large Hadron Collider. Some thoughts:

  • That’s one untidy heap of a website. Is this how it feels to be inside the mind of a brilliant physicist?
  • The name “LHCSound” refers to “Csound”, a programming language for audio synthesis and music composition. But how many of their readers will make the connection?
  • If they are expecting their readers to know what Csound is, then their explanation of the process they used for sonification falls way short. I want to know the details of how they mapped their data to synthesis parameters.
  • What great sampling material this will make. I wonder how long before we hear electronic music incorporating these sounds.

The Immersive Pinball demo I created for Fortune’s Brainstorm:Tech conference was featured in a BBC special on haptics.

I keep watching the HTC Sense unveiling video from Mobile World Congress 2010. The content is pretty cool, but I’m more fascinated by the presentation itself. Chief marketing officer John Wang gives a simply electrifying performance. It almost feels like an Apple keynote.

The iFeel_IM haptic interface has been making rounds on the internet lately. I tried it at CHI 2010 a few weeks ago and liked it a lot. Affective (emotional haptic) interfaces are full of potential. IFeel_IM mashes together three separate innovations:

  • Touch feedback in several different places on the body: spine, tummy, waist.
  • Touch effects that are generated from emotional language.
  • Synchronization to visuals from Second Life

All are very interesting. The spine haptics seemed a stretch to me, but the butterfly-in-the-tummy was surprisingly effective. The hug was good, but a bit sterile. Hug interfaces need nuance to bring them to the next level of realism.

The fact that the feedback is generated from the emotional language of another person seemed to be one of the major challenges—the software is built to extract emotionally-charged sentences using linguistic models. For example, if someone writes “I love you” to you, your the haptic device on your tummy will react by creating a butterflies-like sensation. As an enaction devotee I would rather actuate a hug with a hug sensor. Something about the translation of words to haptics is difficult for me to accept. But it could certainly be a lot of fun in some scenarios!

I’ve re-recorded my techno mix Awake with significantly higher sound quality. So if you downloaded a copy be sure to replace it with the new file!

Awake

Awake
Techno | 46:01 | October 2009

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1. District One (a.k.a. Bart Skils & Anton Pieete) — Dubcrystal
2. Saeed Younan — Kumbalha (Sergio Fernandez Remix)
3. Pete Grove — I Don’t Buy It
4. DBN — Asteroidz featuring Madita (D-Unity Remix)
5. Wehbba & Ryo Peres — El Masnou
6. Broombeck — The Clapper
7. Luca & Paul — Dinamicro (Karotte by Gregor Tresher Remix)
8. Martin Worner — Full Tilt
9. Joris Voorn — The Deep

I recently started using Eclipse on OS X and it was so unresponsive, it was almost unusable. Switching tabs was slow, switching perspectives was hella slow. I searched around the web for a solid hour for how to make it faster and finally found the solution. Maybe someone can use it.

My machine is running OS X 10.5, and I have 2 GB of RAM. (This is important because the solution requires messing with how Eclipse handles memory. If you have a different amount of RAM, these numbers may not work and you’ll need to fiddle with them.)

  • Save your work and quit Eclipse.
  • Open the Eclipse application package by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on Eclipse.app and select “Show Package Contents.”
  • Navigate to Contents→MacOS→, and open “eclipse.ini” in your favorite text editor.
  • Edit the line that starts with -”XX:MaxPermSize” to say “-XX:MaxPermSize=128m”.
  • Before that line, add a line that says “-XX:PermSize=64m”.
  • Edit the line that starts with “-Xms” to say “-Xms40m”.
  • Edit the line that starts ith “-Xmx” to say “-Xmx768m”.
  • Save & relaunch Eclipse.

Worked like a charm for me.

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NYT

24

Jan
2010

One Comment

In sociology
tactility

By Dave

Among journalists, technology breeds fear of obsolescence, corporations

On 24, Jan 2010 | One Comment | In sociology, tactility | By Dave

Another NYT article about technology anxiety, this one by Brad Stone. Some excerpts:

I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.

Well, it’s better to begin to think than to never start. There’s plenty of room for more people to contemplate and write about the future of technology. We are a friendly bunch! Let me be the first to welcome you, Mr. Stone.

But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be entirely second nature, and may even come to expect all software and hardware to operate in this way. Here is where corporations can start licking their chops. My daughter and her peers will never be “off the grid.” And they may come to expect that stores will emanate discounts as they walk by them, and that friends can be tracked down anywhere.

I see, so even though technology will lift people out of poverty and make life longer and more enriching, technology is really just a vehicle for capitalist oppression. And like mad, salivating dogs, corporations will lick their chops. Right.

But the children, teenagers and young adults who are passing through this cauldron of technological change will also have a lot in common. They’ll think nothing of sharing the minutiae of their lives online, staying connected to their friends at all times, buying virtual goods, and owning one über-device that does it all. They will believe the Kindle is the same as a book. And they will all think their parents are hopelessly out of touch.

Of all the mind blowing changes that technology will bring to our society, the real thought-provoker is that those crazy young’uns will think a Kindle is the same as a book!

Mr. Stone: elevate your perspective. If you need help, read my blog, and read what I link to. Anticipate the future. Integrate it. Do develop a grounded, holistic understanding of where we’re going as a technological society. Don’t develop sociological theories based on your marvel at incremental steps like the Kindle. It won’t help you see the big picture.

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04

Dec
2009

No Comments

In interfaces

By Dave

The Gray Ditz discovers augmented reality

On 04, Dec 2009 | No Comments | In interfaces | By Dave

I must speak up on this one. Recently in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Rob Walker wrote a foolish article about augmented reality. The first half deals with introducing augmented reality, the Avatar movie, and the Yelp app. But this is his description of the future of this incredible technology:

Core77, the online design magazine, suggested one amusing possibility earlier this year: fold in facial-recognition technology and you could point your phone at Bob from accounting, whose visage is now “augmented” with the information that he has a gay son and drinks Hoegaarden. More recently, a Swedish company has publicized a prototype app that would in fact augment the image of Bob (or whomever) with information from his social-networking profiles — and they aren’t kidding.

Your silly example wrecks the already floundering article, whose original purpose, I assume, was to inform us about an incoming technology. So how and why did you come up with the idea that Bob would be marked with a note saying his son is gay? It implies that augmented reality entails a violation of privacy, which it does not.

How about: “Fold in facial-recognition technology and you could point your phone at Bob from accounting and see him enwrapped in a digital ecosystem—video tattoos bloom across his body like Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, while around his head swirls a halo of tweets, emotions, and memories. It may all be virtual, but the way you see him is augmented in a very real way.”

But instead of offering a creative example to show that the possibilities are endless, you make up an offensive scenario and then sarcastically write “they aren’t kidding,” which subtly attributes your idea to the people who are developing augmented reality. It’s dishonest.

If this sounds off-putting, it’s worth noting that most assessments of the augmented-reality trend include the speculation that the hype will fade.

So you’re trying to put us off to augmented reality, and then reassure us that we have nothing to worry about since it won’t happen anyway. Then why write about this topic in the first place? If it’s not news, and it’s not interesting, what’s the point? And, “most assessments” is weasely. If you’ve got the goods, link to them, or at least name your sources.

…Why just look at a restaurant, a colleague or the “Mona Lisa,” when you can you can “augment” them all?

The scare quotes around the word ‘augment’ make it sound like you’re uncomfortable with using the word; as if it’s jargon. Expand your horizons! You don’t need to use quotes every time you learn a new word!

I don’t mean to pick you, NYT, but your articles about new technologies are sometimes rather irritating. Instead of writing with genuine interest and optimism about exciting new trends, you project a cynicism that hints at fear and confusion just beneath the surface.

(via DUB For the Future)

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10

Dec
2008

One Comment

In neuroscience
physiology
tactility

By David Birnbaum

The Times on tactility

On 10, Dec 2008 | One Comment | In neuroscience, physiology, tactility | By David Birnbaum

The New York Times has published a piece on tactility and haptics. It’s pretty good, and it may inspire some readers to think more about the role touch plays in their lives. Many of the points made in the article are central to my research and my life, so a proper fisking in order. Let us begin.

Imagine you’re in a dark room, running your fingers over a smooth surface in search of a single dot the size of this period. How high do you think the dot must be for your finger pads to feel it? A hundredth of an inch above background? A thousandth?

I’m hooked. I have no idea, but I’m prepared to be surprised.

Well, take a tip from the economy and keep downsizing.

We dodge the silly reference to arrive at our answer:

Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high. All our punctuation point need do, then, is poke above its glassy backdrop by 1/25,000th of an inch—the diameter of a bacterial cell—and our fastidious fingers can find it.

Wow! Seriously, that’s incredible. I wonder whether we can feel bacteria with our fingers in certain situations.

The human eye, by contrast, can’t resolve anything much smaller than 100 microns. No wonder we rely on touch rather than vision when confronted by a new roll of toilet paper and its Abominable Invisible Seam.

This is great—not the whimsical use of capital letters to catalog the phenomenology of toileting, but the comparison of tactile resolution to visual resolution. It’s a common misconception that touch is less precise than vision. After all, the visual processing we perform to communicate (i.e., reading and writing) can seem much more complex than touch. However vision isn’t necessarily more precise, it’s just more symbol-based, which makes it seem higher resolution because it is associated with complex concepts.

Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away.

I don’t understand “delusionally,” and really wonder what she means. However, it is interesting that simple animals can be said to feel by virtue of their ability to react to their environment, because it says a lot about the concept of feeling: that to feel is to be alive. Nicholas Humphrey wrote in Seeing Red, “The external world is the external world, and it is certainly useful to know what is going on out there. But let the animal never forget that the bottom line is its own bodily well-being, that I am nobody if I’m not me“.

It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.

The chronology of touch is crucial. As I’ve written before, touch frames experience. It sets the boundaries of your self, not only in space but also in time.

Like a mother, touch is always hovering somewhere in the perceptual background, often ignored, but indispensable to our sense of safety and sanity. “Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it,” said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.

Which, again, may say something about touch as a concept: that to live is to touch. Try to imagine that you would like to have the experience of “not touching anything.” You jump out of a plane, but realize that your body is being touched all over by air. You float in space (with no clothes on), and splay your limbs out so that you are sure to not even touch yourself. But sensory receptors throughout your body are still reflecting your body state—the angles of your joints, the stretch of your skin. Is it possible to conceive of a unfeeling animal?

Long neglected in favor of the sensory heavyweights of vision and hearing, the study of touch lately has been gaining new cachet among neuroscientists, who sometimes refer to it by the amiably jargony term of haptics, Greek for touch.

Haptics doesn’t mean touch. It relates to the perception and manipulation of one’s environment. And why is it amiable, because you said so?

They’re exploring the implications of recently reported tactile illusions, of people being made to feel as though they had three arms, for example, or were levitating out of their bodies, with the hope of gaining insight into how the mind works. Others are turning to haptics for more practical purposes, to build better touch screen devices and robot hands, a more well-rounded virtual life.

It’s interesting that the author assumes studying tactile illusions is impractical. In fact, we haptic interface designers use tactile illusions all the time to achieve design goals.

There’s a fair amount of research into new ways of offloading information onto our tactile sense, said Lynette Jones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To have your cellphone buzzing as opposed to ringing turned out to have a lot of advantages in some situations, and the question is, where else can vibrotactile cues be applied?â

For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan J. Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin.

I doubt that Lederman actually said those words, because they’re inaccurate and Lederman is one of the leading scientists in the field. Tactile sensations do not require movement, haptic perception does. Touch is incredibly hard to talk about. To do so successfully we must be particular about terminology.

And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle looms large. Contact is a two-way street, and that’s not true for vision or audition, Dr. Lederman said. If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back.

This is also important—the act of touching necessarily produces change in the world (and thus, the context of experience), making it, at least figuratively, a singularity, or an infinitesimal feedback loop. However, I’m quite sure the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is not involved. Maybe the author knows that. Did she mean to use a difficult concept in particle physics as a metaphor for another difficult concept in perceptual science? If so, does this make the point clearer or more complicated?

Another trait that distinguishes touch is its widespread distribution. Whereas the sensory receptors for sight, vision, smell and taste are clustered together in the head, conveniently close to the brain that interprets the fruits of their vigils, touch receptors are scattered throughout the skin and muscle tissue and must convey their signals by way of the spinal cord. There are also many distinct classes of touch-related receptors: mechanoreceptors that respond to pressure and vibrations, thermal receptors primed to sense warmth or cold, kinesthetic receptors that keep track of where our limbs are, and the dread nociceptors, or pain receptors—nerve bundles with bare endings that fire when surrounding tissue is damaged.

The signals from the various touch receptors converge on the brain and sketch out a so-called somatosensory homunculus, a highly plastic internal representation of the body. Like any map, the homunculus exaggerates some features and downplays others. Looming largest are cortical sketches of those body parts that are especially blessed with touch receptors, which means our hidden homunculus has a clownishly large face and mouth and a pair of Paul Bunyan hands.

There’s another part of the sensory homunculus that’s clownishly large. Go there!

“Our hands and fingers are the tactile equivalent of the fovea in vision,” said Dr. Dijkerman, referring to the part of the retina where cone cell density is greatest and visual acuity highest. “If you want to explore the tactile world, your hands are the tool to use.”

Our hands are brilliant and can do many tasks automatically—button a shirt, fit a key in a lock, touch type for some of us, play piano for others. Dr. Lederman and her colleagues have shown that blindfolded subjects can easily recognize a wide range of common objects placed in their hands. But on some tactile tasks, touch is all thumbs. When people are given a raised line drawing of a common object, a bas-relief outline of, say, a screwdriver, they’re stumped. ‘If all we’ve got is contour information,’ Dr. Lederman said, ‘no weight, no texture, no thermal information, well, we’re very, very bad with that.’

This makes sense. If you think about it, the visual qualities of an object have little in common with sensory qualities of the same stimulus perceived through a different sensory channel. Imagine that you took a two dimensional contour of a screwdriver and mapped the X and Y values to pitch and loudness, and then listened to the contour of the screwdriver. It wouldn’t sound much like a screwdriver. In fact, I would bet that if you had someone listen to that, and then listen to silence, she would say that the silence sounded more like a screwdriver than the contour.

Touch also turns out to be easy to fool. Among the sensory tricks now being investigated is something called the Pinocchio illusion. Researchers have found that if they vibrate the tendon of the biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand drifting ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch the forefinger of the vibrated arm to the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose was lengthening, too.

I want to try this!

Some tactile illusions require the collusion of other senses. People who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view quickly come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it. Other researchers have reported what they call the parchment-skin illusion. Subjects who rubbed their hands together while listening to high-frequency sounds described their palms as feeling exceptionally dry and papery, as though their hands must be responsible for the rasping noise they heard. Look up, little Pinocchio! Somebody’s pulling your strings.

It’s great to see that ordinary journalists are curious about tactility. The article includes many of my own talking points about touch, which is cool. Of course, the way to make someone really appreciate touch is by hugging or hitting them. Alas, writing about touch will have to do for now, until haptic technology makes its glorious arrival.

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