Swedish Company, Smart Textile Company Creates World’s First Musical Tablecloth

Smart Textiles Company Creates World’s First Musical Tablecloth

If you’ve secretly been perfecting your table drumming skills, now is the time to show off. Thanks to this unique musical tablecloth developed by Swedish company ‘Smart Textiles’, you can entertain your dinner guests with your musical prowess. The one-of-a-kind fabric has a drum kit and piano keys printed on it, which actually produce musical sounds when pressed!

Li Guo and Mats Johansson, the brains behind the company, explained that making a musical tablecloth is all about using sensors. While Mats is passionate about music, Li has a doctorate in textile sensors and is studying ways to integrate them into garments. So they put their heads together to combine Li’s research and Mat’s ideas, and came up with the innovative tablecloth. “We wanted to combine sound and textiles and visualise the possibilities of textile sensors in a fun way,” Mats said. “Since I’m interested in music, we decided to create a musical tablecloth.”

“The special thing is, of course, that it is all from textile technologies,” he explained. “We have the woven cloth but on that we added prints for the piano, we added other laminated textile structures for the drums. And these are also from knitted fabrics. And then sewing as connectors or taping, so it is all technologies that we are familiar with in textiles now used for an entertaining purpose in this case.”

“You can see that we have several different pins here, so they are actually functioning as sensors,” Li added. “So when you press one you actually switch it on. And the technology behind this is sense capacitive coupling. So actually it senses any of the conductors and you know that human beings are conductors so when we put our finger on it, it actually switches on.” According the Mats, the challenge they faced while developing the tablecloth was to successfully integrate soft fabrics with hard electronic components. “The problem today is very much where you get this change from the actual fabric to some kind of electronics, from soft flexible things to the rigid hardware and of course the electricity, the batteries.” The duo are working on ways to make these components more flexible and light.

O’ Central.