Sew Portable Soft Speakers
We're going to explore ways to make speakers more wearable, not by sewing ordinary hard speakers into clothes, but by creating new types of speakers out of textiles and conductive yarns. Next, we'll create our own speaker!
HOW DO THE SPEAKERS WORK?
Inside every common speaker are three simple elements: a stationary permanent magnet and a moving voice coil attached to a speaker cone or diaphragm. An amplifier feeds an audio signal through copper wire, which is wound into a coil. When this electrical signal passes through the coil, a magnetic field is created, which interacts with the magnetic field of the permanent magnet. As the signal frequency fluctuates, the coil field also fluctuates and the speaker cone vibrates, pushing and pulling the surrounding air. This creates a pressure wave in the air that extends forward and backward from the cone. Sound!
For a loudspeaker to perform well at all frequencies, we must prevent the pressure waves created by the back of the loudspeaker cone from canceling out the waves created by the front of the cone. This is why loudspeakers are usually built into an enclosure. If you take a speaker out of its case, you will notice a change in tone, as the sound from the rear now interferes with the front.
Soft speakers use these same engineering concepts to explore what an all-textile speaker might look like. Think a hat with a fully built-in speaker, or answer your phone while listening to your gloves in the winter. While the lack of rigid components can make resonance difficult, soft speakers are fun and experimental ways to imagine what a world of soft, squishy technology might look like.
To take a little detour from what makes a good loudspeaker in my artistic practice, I think it's important to ask: why make a soft loudspeaker? Everything about building an effective speaker is all about stiffness and non-flexible components, so why make a not-so-good speaker out of fabric?
For me, that goes back to the central idea of this column, Squishy Tech, which is about imagining what it means to question what constitutes technology, and understanding why we've built the world the way we have. do. A squishy future could be filled with electronic cyborgs made from textile technology, but it could also be uncertain, unknowable and untapped, so we need to experiment and understand what constitutes the technology we take for granted.
I've been experimenting with soft speakers for a while, but I'm not the only one. There are a ton of other e-textile practitioners I have learned from and this work would not be possible without people like Hannah Perner-Wilson, Leah Buechley, Becky Stewart, Claire Williams, Ryth Kesselring, Lee Jones, Sara Nabil , Audrey Girouard, Joanna Berzowska, Marguerite Bromley, Afroditi Psarra and Mika Satomi, who all wrote about their experiments with flexible circuits and/or textile coils long before I made my first spiral!
FACTORS OF MAKING A GOOD SOFT SPEAKER
We're going to explore ways to make speakers more wearable, not by sewing ordinary hard speakers into clothes, but by creating new types of speakers out of textiles and conductive yarns. Next, we'll create our own speaker!
HOW DO THE SPEAKERS WORK?
Inside every common speaker are three simple elements: a stationary permanent magnet and a moving voice coil attached to a speaker cone or diaphragm. An amplifier feeds an audio signal through copper wire, which is wound into a coil. When this electrical signal passes through the coil, a magnetic field is created, which interacts with the magnetic field of the permanent magnet. As the signal frequency fluctuates, the coil field also fluctuates and the speaker cone vibrates, pushing and pulling the surrounding air. This creates a pressure wave in the air that extends forward and backward from the cone. Sound!
For a loudspeaker to perform well at all frequencies, we must prevent the pressure waves created by the back of the loudspeaker cone from canceling out the waves created by the front of the cone. This is why loudspeakers are usually built into an enclosure. If you take a speaker out of its case, you will notice a change in tone, as the sound from the rear now interferes with the front.
Soft speakers use these same engineering concepts to explore what an all-textile speaker might look like. Think a hat with a fully built-in speaker, or answer your phone while listening to your gloves in the winter. While the lack of rigid components can make resonance difficult, soft speakers are fun and experimental ways to imagine what a world of soft, squishy technology might look like.
To take a little detour from what makes a good loudspeaker in my artistic practice, I think it's important to ask: why make a soft loudspeaker? Everything about building an effective speaker is all about stiffness and non-flexible components, so why make a not-so-good speaker out of fabric?
For me, that goes back to the central idea of this column, Squishy Tech, which is about imagining what it means to question what constitutes technology, and understanding why we've built the world the way we have. do. A squishy future could be filled with electronic cyborgs made from textile technology, but it could also be uncertain, unknowable and untapped, so we need to experiment and understand what constitutes the technology we take for granted.
I've been experimenting with soft speakers for a while, but I'm not the only one. There are a ton of other e-textile practitioners I have learned from and this work would not be possible without people like Hannah Perner-Wilson, Leah Buechley, Becky Stewart, Claire Williams, Ryth Kesselring, Lee Jones, Sara Nabil , Audrey Girouard, Joanna Berzowska, Marguerite Bromley, Afroditi Psarra and Mika Satomi, who all wrote about their experiments with flexible circuits and/or textile coils long before I made my first spiral!
FACTORS OF MAKING A GOOD SOFT SPEAKER
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