Liam O’Dell: New suit helps Deaf concertgoers ‘feel’ the crowd – here’s what I think

Live music is far from just an auditory experience; it is also something to be felt. The buzz of the bass, to the rhythmic thumping of drums… The sense of community at a concert or festival – from band to crowd – is something else, but it isn’t always the most accessible to Deaf people.

If we’re unlucky enough to find ourselves far from the speakers to feel the vibrations from the stage, then we can soon feel distant from the music in more than just a literal sense. Key elements of the atmosphere are lost to us, and the exclusion and inaccessibility with which we are all too familiar in our everyday lives creeps in in one place we were hoping to escape from it all – even just for a moment.

Haptic suits designed to address the problem with vibrating technology are not a new phenomenon, and articles about the kit often do the rounds every once in a while, but one vest designed to capture the sound of the crowd as well – backed by the mobile data provider Vodafone – caught my eye.

And so on Saturday, Vodafone kindly invited me down to the Mighty Hoopla festival in Brixton to interview deaf festival goers about their thoughts on the suit, as well as dive into the technology behind it. All of this was for a feature for a mainstream publication, but while chatting to other deaf users of the vest, I took up the opportunity to try out the suit myself for The Limping Chicken and give my honest opinion.

I later learn there were 24 buzzers – ‘actuators’ being the actual and far more technical term for them – situated around the vest. Four of them are on my limbs, with two for my wrists and the other two for my ankles (which do look as bizarre as it sounds).

Straight away, I notice I have to remove my small rucksack in order to put on the suit. For others, it may well be no problem whatsoever with other places to put it, but as a fellow Deaf person told me later, future uses of the tech could prove troublesome if the vest clashes with your festival outfit. In my case, said outfit was actually a rather uneventful white t-shirt and jeans (desperately disappointing for a queer festival, I am aware), but I still had to lug a rucksack around and plonk it between my legs throughout the performance.

The performance in question being the evening set from the wonderful Jessie Ware. Granted, slower songs in her back catalogue only earned themselves the occasional throb in my ankles, but where the suit really excelled was in her disco-style and drum beat-heavy numbers. The hard-hitting rhythm of her track “Wildest Moments” in my chest and feet, together with the claps of other members of the crowd, was quite something. I’d say it captured the ‘electric’ atmosphere of the crowd, if I wasn’t talking about a suit which runs on electricity, but that was certainly one memorable moment of her performance. The dance tracks with the vest on were simply euphoric.

I did wonder beforehand how exactly something as nuanced as audience reaction would be translated into vibrations, and in this instance, they flow up our hands and wrists from our shoulders – which makes sense, really. Wearing a suit over your chest may have you believe that a lot of the effect is simply just repetitive buzzes or blows to the chest during a particularly punchy track, but it sure does feel like a whole new kind of spacial experience, carefully merging an individual response with the reaction of the wider crowd, which isn’t easy.

Though it takes some getting used to to try and figure out what each vibration is trying to emulate. Claps translated to vibrations in the wrist and shoulders makes sense, as does the buzzing in the ankles for the drum beats to ‘ground’ you in the song, but it requires a bit of time to figure out what sensations are replicating the vocals and why you’re getting a slight buzz near your diaphragm.

Looking at the buzzers themselves, their appearance is pretty unremarkable beyond them being slapped with the red Vodafone branding or being giant black blocks. I can’t help but wonder if they could have been adorned with labels telling wearers what exactly it is they’re trying to simulate. My residual hearing and hearing aids managed to give me some pointers, but as I mingled with Deaf friends who were also trying out the kit, I know others were unsure what the vibrations meant, exactly, and where precisely they were supposed to be feeling them.

However, it would be unfair of me to be too critical of a piece of tech which was being tried out for the first time that weekend. Its early iteration sure is promising, and the team behind it have talked of plans to scale it up in the future, so my hope is it will improve in time.

But what it offered in that short Jessie Ware set was a glimpse of its potential. I love dance music – a genre famed for pulsing bass, heavy drums and rich melodies, and with a strong fanbase to boot. If it’s anything like what I experienced on Saturday, then I am – in perhaps more ways than one – absolutely buzzing.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.