Exploring participant interaction with interpersonal touch musical interfaces.

There is growing research on the benefits of interpersonal touch as part of our social lives. Interpersonal touch musical interfaces (ITMIs) are devices that turn a participant's skin into a touch sensitive interface to control music. These devices could have a huge impact on normalizing interpersonal touch interactions as we emerge from restrictions brought on by COVID 19. There is little research that outlines the design of these devices or offers a framework for their implementation. This research hopes to encourage interpersonal touch by examining how participants interact with each other when wearing an ITMI device. It will do this by considering the experiences of a group of participants engaging with a novel bodyworn ITMI. This design framework will illuminate the effect of these devices and be useful to interaction designers and researchers who are examining new ways to encourage interpersonal touch in performance and public art contexts.