Assignment 3: Fabric Speaker
I decided to create a wall of fabric, Initially, I wanted to have two walls of fabric hanging from the ceiling, much like a tunnel of fabrics. To me, big sheets of fabric hanging down from the ceiling recreates the atmosphere of a forest: being overwhelmed by the height and walking aimlessly through the trail. I thought it’ll be interesting to recreate that atmosphere in an urban setting.
Behind the scenes. I wanted to dye the fabric first. I’ve never dyed anything so I thought this assignment will serve as a good opportunity to experiment. I got Royal Blue and Sunshine Orange. I thought these colors would successfully convey the ambient atmosphere I was envisioning for the assignment. I kept listening to Ulrich Schnauss’ Celine while making this piece.
I created a prototype of a thread speaker to see if a conductive thread can act as a speaker. Surprisingly, the thread did play music, but it was very faint.
Also, I needed to see if I have to hand sew the thread speaker onto the fabric, or if I can use the sewing machine. I ended up hand sewing the speaker since I found it difficult to control the sewing machine. Because the speaker was in a spiral, I needed control over the needle.
After sewing the speaker onto the fabric, I connected the two ends of the speaker thread to a circuit to see if it actually worked. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work last night, but I’m hoping it was the problem with how I connected the circuit board, rather than the problem of the actually thread speaker.