We know, you have been focusing on your table drumming skills since your childhood. Now it is time for you to show off and demonstrate your musical prowess. To facilitate your effort, a Swedish company ‘Smart Textiles’ has developed a musical tablecloth.
Li Guo and Mats Johansson, from Smart Textiles explained that sensors paly a big role in developing such musical tablecloth. While Mats is very passionate about music, Li, a textile sensor expert, has been looking into the mechanism of integrating sensors into textile for a long time. So, they sat down together to come up with this unique tablecloth.
“We wanted to combine sound and textiles and visualise the possibilities of textile sensors in a fun way,” Mats mentioned. “Since I’m interested in music, we decided to create a musical tablecloth.”
“The special thing is, of course, that it is all from textile technologies,” he explained. “We have the woven cloth but on that we added prints for the piano, we added other laminated textile structures for the drums. And these are also from knitted fabrics. And then sewing as connectors or taping, so it is all technologies that we are familiar with in textiles now used for an entertaining purpose in this case.”
“You can see that we have several different pins here, so they are actually functioning as sensors,” Li added. “So when you press one you actually switch it on. And the technology behind this is sense capacitive coupling. So actually it senses any of the conductors and you know that human beings are conductors so when we put our finger on it, it actually switches on.”
According to Mats, the main challenge was to integrate soft fabric with hard electronics. “The problem today is very much where you get this change from the actual fabric to some kind of electronics, from soft flexible things to the rigid hardware and of course the electricity, the batteries.” Together they tried hard to make the finished product strong, light and flexible.
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