Overview

FeelHarmonic (non-profit) connects creatives to collaborate on creating new ways to experience sound and images.
We then develop hands-on events that engage and excite while fostering a sense of exploration, communication and connection.
These events are brought to schools, educational institutions and communal centers.

If you feel your community could benefit from an experience like this, and / or if you are a creative who would like to get involved, please get in touch.
We'd love to hear from you.

Details

Here is a brief summary of how FeelHarmonic started and how it works.

From Brendan Angelides (Eskmo):
"After being inspired by various projects I was working on with my music and touring, I set out to develop a project to bring to deaf schools and hopefully help the kids there experience something new. The idea was to combine sound, animation and a physical sensation all into one experience.

I started to develop a conversation with a mother living in San Diego named Kirstal Molina. She has a deaf daughter and is dedicated to helping out the community by being a liaison between families with deaf / hard of hearing kids and social services (schools, after school programs, learning centers and more.) After the project was ready to go, we would bring it to San Diego for the first test trial.

Using only a S ubPac which is a vibrating unit that you place on your chair or wear like a backpack, I wrote a 1.5 minute piece of music using no headphones or speakers. I wanted to make sure the piece translated properly.

The goal of the piece was to not just convey the experience of music, but even more importantly the
feeling of communication.

In my mind as i was writing I pictured little colorful shapes "talking" to each other, telling jokes and then playing music together. Having kids feel notes and basslines was intriguing but I felt it needed to go further. The overall message I wanted to convey was:

"No matter our differences, we can communicate, make sounds and laugh together."

So with these images in my head, I contacted the visual artists Bemo and Cropmotion who created an amazing 1.5 minute piece of animation for the "song" I had created. After month of hard work with little budget, we got to a place with the animation that felt great.

Subpac has already been working with a number of deaf organizations including Maria Batile's Muse Seek Project in the Dominican Republic, so they loved the concept and agreed to bring down 20 packs and help set the event up.

Day of show at Lafayette Elementary:

My laptop running the animation video was connected to the projector in the cafeteria.
My laptop was also connected to a keyboard and to the 20 SubPacs set up in the chairs.
Any child that volunteered got to play the keyboard at the front of the room.
This sent signals to each chair. All the other kids got to feel what was being played and this helped the kids understand the packs and get a sense of what was going on.
For the next section, the animation was projected on a screen and felt by each kid.
They then volunteered to "play" the video by triggering different sections assigned to keys on the keyboard in the front of the room.

All in all 30 kids attended alongside parents, teacher and regional deaf community organizers.

Once we do a few shows, my goal is to allow other visual artists, musicians and people working in educational fields to collaborate and use this FeelHarmonic template. This will allow the experience to reach a number of communities and be a feasible and realistic way for people to get involved.

The opportunity to establish FeelHarmonic under the umbrella of The Echo Society, of which I'm one of the founding members, felt like the right choice."

If you feel your community could benefit from an experience like this, please get in touch.
We'd love to hear from you.