Laetitia Sonami’s Interactive Sound Performance

A project of sound art that I found very interesting and intriguing was Laetitia Sonami’s Lady Glove.

She built the first glove in 1991 out of rubber kitchen gloves, five hall transducers glued to the fingertips, with a magnet on the right hand. Touching the magnet to the different transducers varied the voltage that were fed to a Forth board and coverted into MIDI signals that controlled synths and samplers. Her latest glove was built in 2001 with the help of the STEIM Institute. The glove became a thin black mesh glove that had various colorful wires coming out of it. It had five microswitches, four hall effect transducers, a pressure pad, restitive strips, two ultrsonic recievers, a mercurty swtich and an accelerometer. All of the signals are now mapped through a software that I am familiar with, MAX MSP.

MAX MSP is a great visual coding software used by many sound designers to create interactive sound installations and art around the world. I have used it several times and have always had fun results. It can also be used in video projects as well.

The thing that I admired the most about this project was the fact that she made it originally as a joke, and it quickly became not only the defining piece of her works, but also a very interesting and fun way to create sound in real time. She has used the piece a lot in physical performances, often accompanying narration. I admire the ingenuity of it because it is so simple, but very effective in being able to control sounds, and it has limitless possibilities.

The artist did not use any algorithims as far as I can tell. She mostly used changes in voltage to change synths and samples at first. She since uses a software that converts voltage in a more nuanced way.

She created the glove to comment on how heavy masculine apparel have been used in virtual reality systems in 1991. In that, her intentions and sensibilities were very much realized. But the way in which her project has evolved and been used since 1991, it has shown how creative her original project was.