Music, Mobility, and Inclusive Technology
Making Inclusion Audible at Carleton University
Carleton’s Abilities Living Laboratory has an ambitious mission: to support the full inclusion of every individual into public life, including community, culture and leisure.
It’s a research hub where many disciplines—mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, food science, design and music—all work together toward this goal. Lab Director and Engineering Professor Adrian Chan hopes this leads to new ideas and approaches to accessibility, health, rehabilitation and inclusive design.
“The major problems of society—from poverty to climate change to inclusion and diversity—are complex problems,” he says. “When you try to solve them from a single perspective, you often miss major pieces of the solution. These require adaptive, inherently interdisciplinary and multiple perspectives to move things forward.”
Music for Every Ability
One wing of the Abilities Living Laboratory is home to We Are All Musicians (WAAM), which develops ways for people from all backgrounds to participate in improvisatory music making. This project’s ultimate goals are to create accessible, engaging musical experiences for people with various disabilities and needs, and to develop new instruments and music-making techniques in collaboration with people with disabilities.
Its founder is Carleton Music Professor Jesse Stewart, an award-winning musician and experienced organizer of community-oriented music workshops. Chan says his and Stewart’s work are very similar. They both focus on assistive, adaptive devices for people with disabilities and co-develop technological solutions to disability and mobility challenges.
“I think about musical accessibility in slightly broader terms, because I’m not just thinking about people with disabilities,” says Stewart. “I’m also thinking about people who’ve maybe never played music before.”
Community Workshops and Collaboration
Music education in many places is still largely a function of class privilege and in Canada it starts in Grade 7. It should start in junior kindergarten, says Stewart. It is called “playing music” after all. Music’s many benefits allow young children to improve their spatial reasoning, and their many motor and social skills. “It literally makes children smarter,” says Stewart.
He thinks there needs to be a change in mindset in society: away from thinking about accessibility as an add-on or an afterthought, to “just the right thing to do from the beginning.”
Stewart is in the Abilities Living Laboratory about five days a week and regularly hosts “community music” events that can include high school students, persons with disabilities and professional artists from various backgrounds: lately there have been dancers, percussionists and flamenco guitarists. Put in a room alongside undergraduate students with specialized interests like computer engineering can make for some interesting jams.
Sessions are flexible: they prioritize creativity and personal expression through both high- and low-tech instruments, from theremins and iPads to bells and hand pans. Stewart’s interest is in making music more broadly accessible and inclusive—especially for people with limited motor control or mobility issues, for whom it’s not an option to hold a saxophone or to tap a piano.
Music as Shared Discovery
Chan and Stewart, working with university student Yahia Hassanen, recently developed a new set of musical instruments: the Symphosolids. Small inertial measurement units are embedded within multi-sided polygon shapes that have a unique sound or note assigned to each side. Music is made by turning, flipping and rolling the shapes.
There’s also the Going-Going-Gong system, which Stewart has been working on since 2018. It uses the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) to track body, hand or eye movement to send signals to homemade strikers that rings gongs of various shapes and sizes. Stewart has set up these systems at places including Roger Nielsen Children’s Hospice and Bruyère Health Saint-Vincent Hospital, a complex care facility for patients with limited mobility.
For Stewart, music has always come with a sense of wonder and discovery, something that lit his curiosity. Music is a cooperative art and the nature of any art is to be shared. The setup of AUMI-triggered gongs around his drum kit is an interesting way to perform with others.
In going out to meet with people and inviting them into the Lab, WAAM goes beyond research papers and focuses on building community. What Stewart has published was to encourage other people to do something similar in their own communities. But his priorities are not currently on publication.
“If I’m being totally honest, my main interest is making music with people,” he says. “Music is important, and I consider what we create together a kind of research output. That a group of people with vastly different abilities and interests can come together and make interesting music together—that already is a form of knowledge production.”
Building an Interdisciplinary Future
After all, both making music and research collaboration are very similar: they require open communication, iterative refinement and the synthesis of diverse perspectives to achieve a cohesive outcome.
“When you have two different disciplines interacting with each other, at some point it starts leading to kind of a transdisciplinary approach, where it becomes a new field unto itself,” says Chan. “I think that there might be a future there as well.”
By: Joseph Mathieu with support from Emily Putnam