UX/UI Design | Branding

Sense Sound

Sense Sound is a music application for people with hearing impairment. It provides a unique way of experiencing music through visuals and vibrations that respond to the beats of the music. It can give the deaf an idea of the dynamics and melody of music with various signals.

My role

Discovery, Ideation, Wireframing, Visual Design, Brand identity

Timeline

September - December 2020

Platform

Mobile, Apple watch

Background

Proposal abstract

The purpose of Sense Sound is to provide a new approach to experiencing music to people with hearing impairment. The app will address the interaction between music and visual art and how experiencing music could be successful with other senses rather than hearing. Sense Sound is an app that is connected to existing music streaming apps. The app does not generate the sound of the music, but it visualizes music tones by displaying graphics and creating vibrations. Unlike listening to music with a headphone, people will feel the music with Sense Sound.

Research

Target audience research

Understanding hearing loss

3rd most common health problem in the United States

About 1 in 6 U.S. adults age 18 and over reports some trouble hearing

= 37.5 million U.S adults

Of all people with hearing loss are below the age of 55

Men are about twice as likely as women to have hearing loss

Source: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Understanding Sound/Music

Sounds are made by vibrations that typically propagates as an audible wave of pressure through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid, or solid. Music is organized sound and a combination of those sounds that have a pitch. Pitch is the quality of the sound, making it high or low. When these pitched sounds combine, they make music.

How do deaf people listen to music?

Literally, they don’t. Instead, they have had to develop different methods of sensing music through feeling rather than hearing. While deaf people do not hear the sound in their ears, they still sense the vibration that comes from the sound waves. Sound waves cause our eardrums to vibrate, sending signals to our brain to process what kind of sound it is.

How the brain interprets music

There are a variety of different parts of the brain that play into the perception of music.

Sensory substitution system

It is defined as a change of the characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality.Brain plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to adapt to a changing environment, for instance, to the absence or deterioration of a sense. It is conceivable that cortical remapping or reorganization in response to the loss of one sense may be an evolutionary mechanism that allows people to adapt and compensate by using other senses better.

Musical experience for the deaf

The brain of a deaf person rewires itself to process vibrations in the absence of sound. As a sensory substitution system, another sense adapts in a deaf person's brain to interpret sound and music in a way other than through messages from the ears. When music can be reorganized by feeling the vibrations and visualizing notes/beats, it is much more pleasing to deaf people. Deaf can have this same sort of emotional connection to music. It would just be recognized from the bass notes or beats of the song rather than the higher-pitched melody.