Tactile sound

Tactile Sound is the sensation of sound transmitted directly to the human body by contact, rather than by sound waves through the ears. For example, when you stand on a train platform you can feel the train approaching as well as hearing it. Explosions, crashes, sonic booms, and thunder are all normally felt in addition to being heard. Besides air pressure, tactile sound can be conducted through ground motion. Tactile sound can also be transmitted through water, for example in a swimming pool or hot tub.

In addition to being produced naturally, tactile sound can be produced by a transducer in the same way that sound can be produced through a loudspeaker. Tactile sound has been used by the military for flight and tank simulators, for rides in amusement parks, medical research, home cinema, computer games, and for musical performance.

Various designs for tactile transducers have been presented since the 1960's, most of which fall under the "shaker" category. Shakers create a vigorous vibration by moving a mass (usually a magnet) which is bolted to a final mass (like a chair or couch). A simple example of this is the vibration available on a common cellphone. Another way of producing tactile sound uses "linear actuators", which move furniture (usually up and down), rather than shaking it. The main advantage of linear actuators is that they deliver actual motion (ground excursion), not just vibration.

Tactile sound is often used to increase the realism of an artificial environment. For example, mounting a tactile sound transducer in a chair or couch in a home cinema setup can give more of a sense of "being there". For such use, the transducer is often connected to the LFE channel of an A/V receiver. Tactile sound is often used in combination with a subwoofer so that low frequencies can be both felt and heard.

For musical performance, drummers will often use a tactile sound transducer mounted on their drum stool so they can "feel" themselves playing, rather than using a more conventional stage monitor. The size and power of a stage monitor required to adequately reproduce low frequency drum sounds would be expensive and hard to transport, while a tactile sound transducer can be rather small and require much less power to get the job done.

Producers of Tactile Sound Transducers

 * Buttkicker
 * Sonic Immersion Technologies, LLC
 * Crowson Technology
 * Clark Synthesis
 * Tactile Immersion Environments