My best π day was in 1975 when I invented a new way to estimate π using elementary geometry and algebra. This wasn’t a particularly important result for the mathematical world because there were already so many ways to estimate π but it was one of those moments I can see now as watershed that strongly shaped the rest of my life.

After a quick review of recent rapid developments in intrinsic fiber and textile sensing and actuation, I demonstrate pressure, stretch, position, acceleration, and multitouch sensors built with paper and textile structures. Their performance will be shown informally by integrating them into functional musical instruments. I close with a vision of how a design theory and practice may be developed for these materials, illustrated with new, folded, and pleated piezoresistive structures that have just begun to be explored.Ideas on Building Interactivity in Textiles and Related Fibers, Freed, Adrian , International Symposium on New Frontiers in Fiber Materials Science, 08/2011, Charlston, South Carolina, (2011)

Commentary proposed for NIME Reader

The fingerphone is my creative response to three umbridges: the waste and unsustainability of musical instrument manufacturing practices, the prevailing absence of long historical research to underwrite claims of newness in NIME community projects, and the timbral poverty of the singular, strident sawtooth wavefrom of the Stylophone – the point of departure for the fingerphone instrument design.