- October 30, 2026
- By Jessica Weiss ’05
A flute that feels like raindrops fluttering across the skin. A violin that registers as a looping sensation. Drums that arrive as an insistent, rhythmic pulse.
That’s how Jill Bradbury, a Deaf scholar and director of the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), describes what live music could feel like for Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Now, a $150,000 grant from the Artists Make Technology Lab (AMT Lab), an initiative supporting innovation in the performing arts, will help her and an interdisciplinary UMD team make that a reality.
The team will develop wearable technology and software that use haptic feedback — physical sensations such as vibrations — to translate musical elements into patterns audiences can feel on their bodies. Existing wearable devices largely use vibrations to convey changes in pitch and volume, but Bradbury’s team wants to create distinct patterns that capture the qualities of different instruments and how they interact. By layering these patterns, the team hopes to convey the texture and complexity of music in an entirely new way.
“The goal is not to replicate the experience of someone with a full range of hearing, but to create an equivalent experience,” Bradbury said.
Bradbury’s interest in the technology grew out of her own experiences attending musical theater performances and feeling like she was missing layers of the music, even with her cochlear implant and hearing aid.
The project brings together multiple faculty members as a part of the Haptic Aesthetics for Access and Inclusion team, including Andrew Cissna, lecturer in lighting design; Sam Crawford, UMD sound and media technologist and co-director of the Maya Brin Institute; Dan Leizman MFA ’24, lecturer in art; Jun Nishida, assistant professor in computer science; and Nirupam Roy, associate professor in computer science.
The team previously received support through the College of Arts and Humanities’ Harmony Fellowship, an Arts for All ArtsAMP grant and the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance to study existing wearable technology, including a commercially available Sound Shirt that uses 28 vibrating motors to transmit musical sensations. Their research includes testing the Sound Shirt and other haptic wearables with Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants to better understand what makes these experiences meaningful and enjoyable.
The new grant will support the next phase: developing a prototype of the team’s own wearable hardware and compositional software over six months, beginning in January.
AMT provides funding, advising and opportunities for collaboration to artists exploring digital tools and emerging technologies in the performing arts. The initiative is anchored by Mozilla Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation, in partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, with additional support from the Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network.
“Jill Marie Bradbury and her team are building a language of vibration that carries harmony, texture and emotional nuance, designed with Deaf and hard of hearing audiences from the start,” said Genel Ambrose, program officer, arts and technology, Mozilla Foundation. “This is what happens when artists direct what gets built and who it serves: Composers gain a new medium, and live performance opens to audiences long left out.”
Ultimately, Bradbury hopes the technology will become affordable and widely available to performing arts organizations, opening up new ways for Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to experience live music. But she also envisions a future in which artists create original music designed to be experienced through touch.
“We want to go beyond making existing music more accessible,” she said. “We want to create entirely new music and give people the ability to customize that experience based on their own associations.”