(Just Like) Starting Over? What Earlier Instruments and Their Social Lives Can – and Can’t – Tell Us About Accessible Digital Musical Instruments and Disability

Traditional musical instruments impose demands that exclude many people from participation, including many disabled people. By separating the performance interface from the means of sound production and thereby freeing instrument design, Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) offer great potential for accessibility and have been a site of significant recent innovation. However, disabled people remain significantly underrepresented as DMI designers and designer-performers, and many non-disabled designers reproduce tropes that reinforce ableist norms and risk a kind of hermeneutical injustice. Shifting from technological and physical to social layers of DMI design, and drawing on ideas of social instruments by Campbell, Bates, and Koutsomichalis, and Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis, this chapter argues that accessible DMIs (ADMIs), like DMIs more generally, are shaped by lingering biases from traditional instruments, but, uniquely, also by entrenched disability narratives which portray assistive technologies as untrustworthy. As ADMIs become more common, true inclusion requires both greatly improved representation of disabled designers and extension of the social model of disability to consider ADMIs as cultural, and culture-shaping, artefacts.