Sophie Chen – Looking Outwards 11

Laetitia Sonami

Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer, and composer of interactive electronic music based in San Francisco. What initially drew my attention is “The Lady’s Glove”, an instrument she developed herself, which triggers and manipulates sound in live performance. This instrument is worn on her right hand, and is a black glove made of mesh integrated with a lot of different sensors such as micro-switches, pressure pads, ultrasonic receivers, and light sensors, just to name a few. The signals the glove receive are connected to a hardware named Sensorlab, which is then mapped onto MAX MSP running on a computer, which connects it to pre-stored sounds.

Sonami said that through creating this instrument, she was trying to figure out at which point does a controller become an instrument. I found what she said to be very insightful and thought provoking, especially applicable today when there are so many tools around us that we can just use to generate things without even putting much thought into it. Sonami concludes that when a software starts adapting to the controller, it becomes more of a symbiosis between the controller, the code, and the software. I think her glove does successfully embody that and qualify as an instrument, not just a controller/generator.

(jump to 10:34 for Sonami performing with the glove)