Knot-music

Yohta Kitagawa, Shinnosuke Hirose · 2026 · Role: Co-created all objects while taking responsibility on concept, interaction design, fabrication.

How can wired earphones weave tangible, embodied, and entangled experiences?

Knot-music uses wired earphones to recreate existing objects in the world. Focusing on its material properties, such as the form and data flow being the same, the leakage of sound blurring the public and private, Knot-music envisions and inspires people to rethink boundaries in an entangled and complex world we live in.

Iteration 1: Knot-music (Performance)

Three MP3 players drive three wired earphones.
Four microphones around the performance area capture sound leakage and handling noise.
Each microphone feeds the matching loudspeaker in a four-channel array.
The earphones' physical positions become the spatial mix.

Publications & Exhibitions

Poster under review at SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.

→ Watch the full video

Future Iterations

Knot-hat (2026, in progress)

Knot-plant (2026, in progress)

Knot-sudare (2026, in progress)

Process

Knot-music began with the everyday act of untangling earphones. For the first iteration, playing three different tracks through three entangled pairs turned the task of untangling into a spatial composition that changes with every pull and knot.

The same material exploration continued in Knot-hat, a wearable structure woven from roughly a hundred wired earphones. We pushed this way of making to Knot-plant and Knot-sudare, slowly seeing the world through the lens of wired earphones. The project is ongoing, and we are actively thinking what can be said from this practice.

Credits

Created and performed by Yohta Kitagawa and Shinnosuke Hirose.