Hello, my name is quinn jarvis-holland i'm a student at portland community college and my paper is titled
expanding access to music technology
rapid prototyping accessible instrument solutions for musicians with intellectual disabilities
We developed this ensemble of accessible digital musical instruments for artists at the portland art and learning studio
It's a open floor plan studio serving
dozens of artists that work in a variety of mediums
They had a musical instrument section
But it was just traditional acoustic instruments with no adaptations
My team was a diverse group of creative technologists like myself
Our team with guidance from daniel rolnick and myself began by setting intentions of intersectional justice
using people first language
talking about the social model of disability
and going over disability rights history as well as tips for interacting with people with intellectual disabilities and
developmental disabilities
For example here in oregon the state hospital was forcibly sterilizing feeble-minded pearsons until
1981
And only until recently have those people been taught to read and write
This calls on us to take into account the history of oppression these people have faced
And it also calls on us to keep high expectations for what they might be capable of
The parameters for our project were a parts budget of four hundred dollars for the control surfaces
to do the sound generation in macs
utilize a variety of sensors
assist artist expression and choice
Create intuitive and inspiring interfaces for players of all abilities
facilitate consonant or in-key improvisation
Facilitate quantized rhythm as well as real-time playing make sounds that complement each other when played together
Use well-documented development tools like those available from adafruit and pgarc
And use low-cost materials and open source materials where possible
This is to make it potentially easier to replicate at other maker spaces
or studios
I'm going to skip right over the development process and leave those details in the paper
and focus on the instruments we came up with
We created five controllers paired to computers running sound generation and gui applications
And these receive a global osc message via wi-fi and or lan that sets the global key in mode?
Or these can be set per instrument for more musical variation
The instruments are an interactive drum sequencer
An auto scaling capacitive touch synthesizer
a rotation detecting headband synthesizer
a handheld nine degrees of freedom controller
And an xbox connect earhart
Now here's the part i'd love to share some footage of it being used
So
And here's the rotation detecting headband synth
Yeah
Now unfortunately because of kovid we weren't able to get further footage
Or practice sessions with the artists. Um, so we only have this short clip of us playing the ensemble together
So
Conclusions from this project
were
That some of the artists had vastly different preferences and interface
Seemed that their affect had a much bigger role in determining this than their diagnosis
Different instruments visual and sonic and tactile feedback require consideration of cognitive style
Seem that more introverted people again
We're drawn to things that were more predictable or perhaps more static and sound rather than more erratic
Our frameworks for virtuosity are less useful than the level of artists engagement or other nonverbal cues
It's actually pretty hard to put into words sometimes
What some of these cues are?
But I think that you can see it in the rotation detecting headband synth clip
that that artist was really feeling immersed in
their experience producing sound
There's generally enthusiastic response to more immediate gesture to sound relationships
During testing it was difficult to clearly hear individual instruments. So we were thinking separate monitors could help
Accessibility
Or sorry accessible and object
Accessible and object-oriented programming makes it easier to develop solutions for minority populations
Saved a lot of time using pre-built libraries and
electronics that have a lot of documentation
And this hyper localized rapid development process
That we used can be applied to similar design issues for not minority populations
That traditional design processes and evaluation frameworks may not serve
Our project was successful in prototyping an adapted digital ensemble
And we're looking forward to being able to work with the artists more in the future
Looking ahead. We'd love to explore capturing and sonifying stemming behaviors
centralizing sound generation to a single efficient brain
Using open source alternatives to max for the sound generation
And applying machine learning to add musical complexity and variety over time
As opposed to being stuck in just one scale
I'm gonna go ahead and yield the rest of my time to questions. Thank you