Inspired by Marcelo Coehlo’s paper speaker and Vincent Leclerc’s Accouphene textile speaker, we have been trying out different techniques on building fabric speakers.
Woven speaker >> http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=5509
Knit speaker >> http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=4465
Embroidered speaker >> http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=2936

Some experiments made by Claire Williams with the couching embroidery technique and a coil basket weaving technique:
>> https://xxxclairewilliamsxxx.wordpress.com/electronic-textiles/#Textile

Here is a embroidered fabric speaker made as a swatch sample with step by step tutorials.

Materials and Tools

Materials: cotton fabric, cotton thread, copper thread (Karl-Grimm), neodymium magnet, copper conductive fabric, fusible interfacing

Tools: sewing needle, scissors, iron,

Tools to test: audio amplifier (we use this amplifier from adafruit)

Diagram

Diagram of a speaker

or read this article >> http://www.explainthatstuff.com/loudspeakers.html

Step by Step

thread the copper conductive thread to needle (you may need a needle with big eye like embroidery needle) and bring this end to the back of the fabric, leave about 10cm on this side. Take out the thread from the needle.
Flip the fabric to the front side. Thread the cotton thread to the needle. Use couching stitch to fix the copper conductive thread onto the base fabric. The copper thread is placed as a spiral shape. Make sure each circle of the spiral does not touch each other. The copper conductive thread is not isolated unlike magnet wire, so it does not work as coil when they are touching each other.

Here is a youtube tutorial on couching stitch.

When the embroidered spiral gets big enough, bring the both end of the copper conductive thread to one end of the fabric. Place two small pieces of copper conductive fabric with fusible on the fabric, using iron. Sandwich the copper thread’s end with copper conductive fabric and base fabric so it gets fixed and electrically connect to the copper fabric.

Now, time to test. connect the Audio Amplifier to the computer (or MP3 player.. anything that play sound). We added mini-jack cable to it to make it easy to connect with computers. connect power (we use lipo battery) to power the amplifier, then connect the output sound (A+ and A-) to the fabric speaker we just made. Place a big strong magnet from the back of the fabric speaker. Do you hear the sound?

You can also make speaker with other techniques. Here is my trial on copper conductive fabric cut with Vinyl cutter, then fused onto fabric with fusible interfacing.