Inclusive improvisation: exploring the line between listening and playing music

The field of Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) is growing rapidly, with instrument designers recognising that adaptations to existing Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) can foster inclusive music making. ADMIs offer opportunities to engage with a wider range of sounds than acoustic instruments. Furthermore, gestural ADMIs free the music maker from relying on screen, keyboard, and mouse-based interfaces for engaging with these sounds. This brings greater opportunities for exploration, improvisation, empowerment, and flow through music making for people with disability and the communities of practice they are part of. This article argues that developing ADMIs from existing DMIs can speed up the process and allow for more immediate access for those with diverse needs. It presents three case studies of a gestural DMI, originally designed by the first author for his own creative practice, played by people with disability in diverse contexts. The article shows that system-based considerations that enabled an expert percussionist to achieve virtuoso performances with the instrument required minimal hardware and software changes to facilitate greater inclusivity. Understanding the needs of players and customising the system-based movement to sound mappings was of far greater importance in making the instrument accessible

Using Music Technology Creatively to Enrich Later-Life: A Literature Review

Background: A growing body of evidence has demonstrated significant social and emotional benefits of music-making amongst senior citizens. However, several as-yet unresolved age-related barriers to “musicking” have been identified. Positioned within the emergent field of gerontechnology, concerned with the interface between aging and technology research, this review of literature thus explores the potential for music technologies to function as a vehicle for creative musical opportunities in later-life.Methods: ERIC, PsychInfo, and Web of Science databases were searched, focusing on the intersection between music, technology, and aging. The criteria for inclusion were that the paper should: (1) be in English; (2) report empirical research involving the use of music technologies intended to support receptive (listening, interpreting, reflecting) or active (playing, creating, performing) engagement with music amongst older persons, defined as being aged 60 years or above (United Nations, 2017); (3) be published as a peer reviewed journal article.Results: Of 144 papers screened, 18 papers were retained. 10 studies focused on using technology to support musicking in the form of listening, reflecting, and interpreting. Just five studies explored the utility of technology in promoting singing or playing instruments, while a further three were focused on music and movement.Conclusions: Overall, the literature reviewed suggests that older people, even those with complex needs, are capable of, and interested in using music technologies to access and create personally meaningful music. The limited research that does exist points to multiple and significant benefits that may be derived from receptive or active musicking supported by a range of music technologies

Accessibility and dimensionality: enhanced real time creative independence for digital musicians with quadriplegic cerebral palsy

Inclusive music activities for people with physical disabilities commonly emphasise facilitated processes, based both on constrained gestural capabilities, and on the simplicity of the available interfaces. Inclusive music processes employ consumer controllers, computer access tools and/or specialized digital musical instruments (DMIs). The first category reveals a design ethos identified by the authors as artefact multiplication -- many sliders, buttons, dials and menu layers; the latter types offer ergonomic accessibility through artefact magnification. We present a prototype DMI that eschews artefact multiplication in pursuit of enhanced real time creative independence. We reconceptualise the universal click-drag interaction model via a single sensor type, which affords both binary and continuous performance control. Accessibility is optimized via a familiar interaction model and through customized ergonomics, but it is the mapping strategy that emphasizes transparency and sophistication in the hierarchical correspondences between the available gesture dimensions and expressive musical cues. Through a participatory and progressive methodology we identify an ostensibly simple targeting gesture rich in dynamic and reliable features: (1) contact location; (2) contact duration; (3) momentary force; (4) continuous force, and; (5) dyad orientation. These features are mapped onto dynamic musical cues, most notably via new mappings for vibrato and arpeggio execution

Picturing musical accessibility: Co-creating music therapy with disabled children and their families

This thesis reports research that explores group music-making with disabled children and their families, with a focus on how, when, and under what preconditions music becomes fully accessible and meaningful for everyone involved. Existing research has often focused on dimensions of disability and accessibility in relation to the individual child. In contrast, this study considers accessibility and meaning as distributed across whole families and groups of families and considers disabled children and their families as co-researchers in understanding such processes. The study draws on two projects which were informed by participatory action research, emancipatory disability research and ethnography - where doing music was both method and result. The first project took place in the home of a single family and focused on the process of collaborative knowledge development. The second project took the form of a music café, a weekly musical and social meeting space for neurodiverse families. Visual methods were used to document, analyse and represent the various practices involved in music making and tracing the trails of people, activities and objects. The drawn representations provide evidence of how accessibility and meaning is produced collaboratively by disabled children, their families, and a music therapist by showing the relationships between bodies and materials in context. Aligned with principles from community music therapy and anti-oppressive approaches, this thesis argues that music therapy with families can be considered as collaborative action. It challenges the view that the music therapist has sole expertise in facilitating accessible musical interaction. Thinking instead of music therapy as being distributed amongst all participants points to the importance of valuing shared expertise as well as noticing the contribution of material, sensorial and environmental factors. I suggest how ‘graphic music therapy’ could be an alternative way of understanding and representing the complex processes involved in co-creating music therapy

Unmasking the Power of Play Through TUI Designs

Research on the potential benefits of technology for autistic children is an emergent field in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially within the Child-Computer Interaction Community. At the same time, there are concerns about what these interventions and technologies are for and who benefits. We present a research and design approach for Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) for minimally verbal to nonverbal autistic children following a neurodiversity narrative through three field studies developed and evaluated with three groups of children within a semi-structured scholastic environment between 2018 and 2021 in the UK. We discuss our insights for research and TUI designs in the context of social play for nonverbal autistic children and critically reflect on the methods and approaches we used. We do this to disrupt the normalisation agenda that subtly permeates the field of HCI and to direct designers’ attention toward supporting autistic ways of being in the world

Olly: A tangible for togetherness

This research explores how tangible interactive technology might offer opportunities for socialization and sensory regulation. We present a study carried out in an educational setting during leisure activities with a small group of children with autism who like music. We introduce Όλοι (pronounced Olly), a sonic textile Tangible User Interface (TUI) designed around the observations of five minimally verbal children with autism aged between 5-10 years. The TUI was tested for an average of 24 minutes once per week, over a period of five weeks in a specialized school based in North-East London, UK. We propose a methodological approach that embraces diversity and promotes designs that support repetitive movements and self-regulation to provide the children with a favorable environment and tools to socialize with peers. The findings show positive outcomes with regards to spontaneous social interactions between peers particularly when children interacted with or around Olly. These were observed in the form of eye-contact, turn-taking, sharing (of the space, the object and experience), and more complex social play dynamics like associative and cooperative play. We illustrate how the TUI was a positive stimulus of social behaviors and discuss design implications for novel technologies that aim to foster shared experiences between children with autism

Trail ride nation: Zydeco music & Creole entanglements in Southwest Louisiana

This doctoral thesis brings into focus the connections between humans, non-humans and zydeco at trail rides in Southwest Louisiana and Eastern Texas. Creole trail rides have become spirited social occasions centered around horses, food, music and dancing. The transient, mobile nature of trail rides offers a unique opportunity to consider the power of human-nonhuman entanglements and their impact on social becoming and collective solidarity. I explore how the region’s ‘Trail Ride Nation’ has emerged from and is sustained by its human participants’ specific relationships with horses, sound, clothing and food. I ask: How can we understand human becoming, specifically ‘trail rider’ becoming, as an entanglement with non-human animals and materialities? Mindful of the complex racial history in Louisiana, I also address how these entangled relationships connect to understandings of ‘creolization’ as a process of ‘creation, invention, critique, and resistance’ (Cohen and Toninato 2010: 14), and I ask how can they can become tools for self-making and reinvention against the region’s historical backdrop of racial segregation and systems of exclusion. This thesis explores how encounters with non-humans can encourage communal action and what kind of common world emerges by way of sonic, sartorial and edible engagements. I aim to present an argument that the cultural identity and collective belonging that marks what it is to be a trail rider is constituted by these changing and dynamic relationships