(Just Like) Starting Over? What traditional instruments can – and can’t – tell us about DMIs and disability

Founded in 2001, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference series has become a prominent annual platform and showcase for new instruments and related developments, and a sizeable community has developed around it. A significant number of accessible musical instruments have been presented at NIME, and increased interest in the area has been noted by Frid and Ilsar (2021). At the same time, the lead author of this paper—a congenitally one-handed new instrument designer and player—and Australian Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) designer-performer Andrew McMillan, are, to the best of our knowledge, the only physically disabled designers of new instruments to have presented autobiographically related work in the NIME era.

If the efforts of Drake Music, The OHMI Trust, and some members of the NIME community mean that one-handed players and other disabled musicians likely have more options today than ever before, it is vital to ask why, despite the ever-growing number of new instrument designers and designer-performers, disabled people remain so underrepresented in these roles. The answer, Zayas-Garin and McPherson (2022) suggest, is rooted in a reality where disabled people all too rarely have truly meaningful involvement in instrument creation.

After almost 20 years of making new instruments, interfaces and interactive installations for use primarily by other people, the lead author has recently created their first instrument intended for personal use. Thus, this paper first explores the relevance of prior musical experiences and “old” instrument designs to the design of this new instrument from a one-handed perspective. To do so, we draw on four different strands of theory: i) work by Bates (2012) on the social lives of (traditional) musical instruments, ii) the notion that instruments can tell “stories of a sort” (Koutsamichalis, 2022), iii) the idea of narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder, 2001), and iv) the concept of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007). We subsequently use the latter concept to further the idea of empowering disabled players more widely to create instruments around themselves. Current barriers to this are discussed and directions for future work are outlined.

References

Bates, E. (2002). The Social Life of Musical Instruments. Ethnomusicology, 56(3), pp. 363–395.

Frid, E. and Ilsar, A. (2021). Reimagining (Accessible) Digital Musical Instruments: A Survey on Electronic Music-Making Tools, in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Shanghai, China.

Koutsomichalis, M. (2022). Instruments that are more than instruments (and other stories). Ricercare, vol. 15, pp. 76–106.

McMillan, A. (2022). Developing a design framework for constructing an accessible musical instrument from an autoethnographic point of view. NIME 2022.

Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2001). Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: University of Michigan Press.

Zayas-Garin, E. and McPherson, A. (2022) 'Dialogic Design of Accessible Digital Musical Instruments: Investigating Performer Experience', in NIME 2022. doi:10.21428/92fbeb44.2b8ce9a4.