The BodyHarp: Designing the intersection between the instrument and the body

Mutualizing the body and the instrument offers a different way of thinking about designing embodied musical interfaces. This research presents the design of the BodyHarp, a wearable instrument that combines large bodybased gestures with the fine control of hand-based instruments. This reflects a desire to create a single interface that both captures expressive, dance-like, body movement as well as nuanced gestural interactions. The BodyHarp was not designed as a separate artifact, but rather it was crafted as an augmentation to the human body. This fusion seeks to enhance the sense of intimacy between the player and the instrument and carries a different type of aesthetic - like playing a traditional instrument (the harp) but as part of the body. In other words, the BodyHarp aims to capture creative body movement and placing it in an instrumental context. In
doing so, we aim to blur the transition between two gestural mediums (dance and playing an instrument) by mutualizing them — or, in a sense, by designing the interface as a part of the body.