Using Vibrotactile Patterns for Conveying Orchestral Conducting Gestures to Blind and Visually Impaired Musicians

Orchestral conducting relies predominantly on visual gestures to convey timing, dynamics, articulation, cueing, and expressive intent, creating a significant accessibility barrier for Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) musicians. This work investigates whether structured vibrotactile patterns, commonly referred to as tactons, can provide a non-visual channel for representing selected orchestral conducting cues, focusing on the design and perceptual evaluation of tactile encodings for conducting-related information. To this aim, a wearable sleeve equipped with vibrating motors in a simple layout was leveraged to implement established vibrotactile display principles such as spatially distributed stimulation, temporal patterning, and coarse intensity modulation. Preliminary experiments involving both sighted and BVI participants were conducted to assess stimulus localization, intensity discrimination, and the perception of combined vibrotactile features. The outcomes of these experiments informed the design of a set of tactons representing conducting intentions such as beat, entrance, cut-off, pointing, crescendo, and diminuendo. The resulting tacton set was subsequently evaluated with BVI participants through recognition tasks designed to assess its interpretability and effectiveness. Results demonstrate that the BVI cohort was able to reliably identify six tactons after limited training, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 77%, with individual accuracies ranging from approximately 60% to nearly 100%.