Stretch Pants.

The 20th Century avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen routinely engaged in a process of ‘microphonic’ composition.

Microphony can be described as a phenomenon in which electronic equipment or devices transform mechanical vibrations into an undesired electrical signal or noise. It deals with conditions of sound, music, or aural information that is usually too quiet to hear with the human ear, something that is there but not there, and hence only detectable by amplification, or really zooming into the source.

Such a procedure of identifying and synthesizing vibrations as potential elements to be utilised within a composition also allows specific fragments of sound to be stretched out, or compressed, to any desired time-frame. An extended and comprehensive body of music can then be derived from an expanded momentary sound recording.

Can we devise analogous methodologies in which designers only engage with a tiny detail or ‘sequence’ of a garment, rather than being concerned with the whole or completed garment? Can we develop forms of ‘microscoping’ technologies that acutely examine components or structures that may be invisible, too small, or too unremarkable, to recognize otherwise, whereby the microscope becomes a design instrument or tool in its own right?