A Design Approach to Engage with Audience with Wearable Musical Instruments: Sound Gloves

This paper addresses the issue of engaging the audience with new musical instruments in live performance context. We introduce design concerns that we consider influential to enhance the communication flow between the audience and the performer. We also propose and put in practice a design approach that considers the use of performance space as a way to engage with the audience. A collaborative project, Sound Gloves, presented here exemplifies such a concept by dissolving the space between performers and audience. Our approach resulted in a continuous interaction between audience and performers, in which the social dynamics was changed in a positive way in a live performance context of NIMEs. Such an approach, we argue, may be considered as one way to further engage and interact with the audience.