The Technology

Although the academic and professional institutions themselves have been slow to recognize the emergence of acoustics as a technological science, the last years were characterized by the advancement and dissemination of knowledge of sound and vibration.

Sound, pressure and vibration represent physical phenomena highly interrelated: Sound is a form of energy generated by vibrations; sound pressure is the local pressure deviation from the ambient (average or equilibrium) atmospheric pressure, caused by a sound wave; and in turn, vibration represents an oscillatory motion. Sound, pressure and vibration can affect the human body through mechanoreceptors (receptors specialized to sense mechanical forces), which translate the sensory input in specific somatosensory experiences (i.e. sound or touch) due their different threshold sensitivity to pressure and vibration.

Grounded on this knowledge, Sonoception will exploits the results of the recent studies in the field using the following hardware:

to simulate/stimulate the contents of the Inner Body:

Interoception
Proprioception
Vestibular Input

This hardware will be integrated using a software module interface (a classifier similar to the technologies used in the Brain-Computer interfaces - BCI) able to process the periodic vibrations generated by external (exteroceptive) and internal events.

We will modify and adapt the actual BCI technology to process and classify these events and to send back in real time the audio vibrations to the body by means of the sonoception transducers hardware.

Software manipulation of these outputs will simulate/stimulate the Inner Body and will foster the spatiotemporal coordination (entrainment) of bodily signals (Critchley, 2004; Wilson & Cook, 2016).