According to Woolman (2000, p.6), “music is much more than the surface qualities as defined by a dictionary. It is about the movement of sounds through space and time.” Therefore I try to let music lead me, which inspired me to blend it into my work and transfer the feeling of sound into my vision during my design career. Some collections are based on a certain music style or specific song. I am going to continue in this field and fully entwine the concept of sound into the creation of garments while furthering my studies.

 

Therefore, the intention of this creative practice project is to create the audible clothes. This idea came from my previous collection I mentioned, which were always inspired by music culture. However, it leaded me to raise a question that why the garment always is a secondary role in the performance? Does it have any possibility that the clothes could inspire music or any performance instead, in term of a wearable sound? To context the performativity and sounds, it is necessary to acquire the depth understanding and information of these topics. Therefore, the following artists’ works let me engage my intention of the project.

 

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Nick Cave, who designed the Sound Suit collection, is my primary research. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits. The one I want to list out in this research is the one covered with twigs, sculptured his scale of body and tried to express the idea that he wants the viewers treat the performers without judging their identities (Cave,2009, p.12). Through the movement,enacted by the performers, the twigs started to make the sounds and noise that let me form my work. 

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Secondly, Jessica Bugg, who designed “Perceiving Dress: Optical Laces”, approached even further to my intention of this project. The film Perceiving Dress: Optical Laces tried to build a conversation between viewers and the dancer through the visual impacts. In this experimental film, the dancer , who wears a dress cover with shoelaces, uses the movement of body and sound of dress to communicate with viewers. The emotion of the concept, which Bugg tried to convey, clearly to be heard via the sound and movement made by the dress. Comparing to Cave’s works, the dress is more wearable, but still, capable of producing sounds.

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After this, the performance“The Sound of Movement Wearables: Performing UKIYO” lead me connect the sonic clothes and performativity. According to Birringer and Danjoux (2013), the UKIYO is a cooperated relationship between runway and performance. The project aimed to explore “How wearability can enhance listeners’ performance of the audible or performativity of sound?” Attention of UKIYO is drawn throughout to the sounding wearable through the dancers in the layering backgrounds. Based on that, my project’s concept would gain some inspirations from the main idea of the UKIYO performance “[…] into a collective behavioral environment where we listen and follow the smallest movement, the exhalation, the whisper of rustling fabric, the pleated sigh, the whirring of a tiny speaker worn on a wrist.” (Birringer and Danjoux, 2013, p.233) 

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However, instead of boarding this field on worldwide, I choose to target the Taiwanese indigenous elements as the reference of the project. “Taiwan’s cultural variety and distinction offers potential application in the field of design, especially as designing local features into products appears to be more and more important for the global market, where products are losing their identity because of similarities in function and form.” (Lin, R.T., 2007).