Conductor, music – illustrative photo.
Paris – From next season, the Paris Philharmonic will offer vibrating backpacks that will allow the deaf and hard of hearing to perceive music mediated. For the novelty, the concert hall cooperates with the company SoundX, which invented technology using artificial intelligence. It transcribes all the sounds in the hall into vibrations that the listeners will feel, wrote the AFP agency.
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The company tested the technology for eight months, and the result is backpacks connected to the application. All backpacks in the hall are controlled by the organizers using a single tablet, listeners do not need to download anything to their phones. From autumn, the device will be available for some performances, from the 2024/2025 season it should work at all performances of the Paris Philharmonic.
In recent years, vibration packages have already been used at various concerts, but they were only able to capture deep bass tones . The solution proposed by SoundX will allow the capture of music frequencies up to 20,000 hertz, while current technology captures at most 100 hertz, said SoundX founder Damien Quintard.
The device will be free for disabled visitors and will not affect the 20 percent discount they have for all tickets, said the deputy director of the Philharmonic, Sarah Konéová. The institution is also preparing other alternatives. From autumn, three concerts and one children's show will be played here, which will be accompanied by interpretation into sign language.
Quintard believes that these vibrating backpacks could eventually move from theaters to the everyday lives of deaf people. For example, they would allow them to more easily record a car horn, an ambulance siren or a dog barking, Quintard enumerates.
