Vocal and Tangible Interaction in RHYME

Our voice and body are important parts of our self-expression and self-experience for all of us. They are also essential for our way to communicate and build relations cross borders such as abilities, ages, locations and backgrounds. Voice, body and tangibility gradually become more important for Information and Communication Technology (ICT), due to increased development of tangible interaction and mobile communication. The voice and tangible interaction therefore also become more important for the fields of Assistive Technology, Health Technology and Universal Design. In this paper we present and discuss our work with voice and tangible interaction in our on-going research project RHYME. The goal is to improve health for families, adults and children with disabilities through use of collaborative, musical, tangible and sensorial media. We build on use of voice in Music Therapy, knowledge from multi-sensory stimulation and on a humanistic health approach. Our challenge is to design vocal and tangible interactive media that are sensorially stimulating. Interactive media that through use, can reduce isolation and passivity and increase empowerment for all the users. We use sound recognition, generative sound synthesis, vibrations and cross-media techniques, to create rhythms, melodies and harmonic chords to stimulate voice-body connections, positive emotions and structures for actions.