Instrument design by and for disabled musicians: the roles of technical discourse and vernacular creativity - LISS DTP

PhD project summary: An estimated 16 million people in the UK live with a disability (DWP statistics 2023), of which 48% have mobility impairments and 25% have impaired dexterity. Traditional musical performance opportunities are severely restricted for this population due to a lack of suitable instruments: nearly all acoustic instruments assume two dextrous hands. This gap has led to an emerging body of research and development in so-called accessible musical instruments which include mechanical adaptations of traditional instruments, such as clarinets and saxophones whose key work has been rearranged to be playable with a single hand, or new digital instruments which might or might not emulate traditional instrumental sounds. Despite some high-profile successes, enduring and economically scalable instrument designs lag far behind the scale of the problem. Well-intentioned engineering “solutions” by non-disabled designers often miss the mark in ways obvious to disabled musicians and educators, falling short of improvised adaptations by musicians and their close contacts. However, only a minority of musical access challenges can be addressed without specialist technical expertise. In this studentship, we argue that what appears from a distance as a technical problem is really two overlapping social (and socio-technical) problems: first, what makes an instrument acceptable to a specific person in a specific social and artistic context goes well beyond what sounds it can produce. Second, engineering itself involves a social process of constructing concepts and representations of things in the world. The language of engineering is not neutral: it privileges certain values and aesthetics over others, influenced by what musical situations are most easily described in words and technical specifications. We therefore propose a social reframing of ongoing practices of accessible musical instrument design. Interdisciplinary research is already common in this area, often centring perspectives from music or engineering within a broader landscape encompassing the arts, humanities and social sciences. We also embrace interdisciplinarity, but we will centre perspectives from science and technology studies (STS), unpacking how knowledge is constructed and how discourse comes to constrain what constitutes a problem or a solution in the first place. The project involves a close collaboration with UK disability arts charities The OHMI Trust and Drake Music. Both charities work closely with disabled musicians; both foster communities of disabled and non-disabled instrument designers; and both are regularly contacted by external designers with ideas and prototypes. Using a combination of ethnographic observations, interviews, analyses of design artefacts and what the designers have said about them, we will examine how technical language, musical meaning and lived experience of disability are intertwined in creating new instruments. In particular, we will explore contrasts between the discourse and methods in engineering processes versus the situated resourcefulness of people adapting technologies for their own use. We do not seek categorical claims that one approach is always superior to another. Rather, by foregrounding the sociality of technical design processes, we seek to refocus attention in ways that allow future designers, analysts, educators, musicians and caregivers to pursue more effective and tailored approaches to promoting inclusive...

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