Co-Created Bespoke Solutions

Dr Sarah Nicolls, UK, Steve Varden, UK

We were brought together by the Sony Assistive Musical Instrument Hackathon in September 2024. I had not met Steve Varden before and we were tasked to create an instrument for him. Steve is in a wheelchair and can only perform with one hand as he needs his other arm to balance. He has quite big movements but during his first music performance (of some really energetic electronic dance music) I was able to observe that he can anchor his hand using a kind of roll from the thumb so that he's able to control knobs and faders one at a time with hand gestures. In the pre-call, he told us that he wanted to be able to play chords but that he didn't have the dexterity to play a keyboard. Steve has quite a few great interfaces that allow gestural capture, like pads, but it was this specific control over the harmony that he was unable to explore. His most delightful provocation was for us to make an edible device: i.e. attractive.  My first focus was on what we do musically with chords and how I personally like to explore chords. On a keyboard preset it's easy to play the root to make a major, minor or seventh. But when I'm improvising at the piano that isn't how I play chords. It's a much more organic journey, often just changing one note to travel. This is what I wanted to give Steve.  We began to explore physically what might work for Steve, imagining chords and notes being triggered. We just used a table and objects we'd found lying around, old CDs, some foam, wooden fruit, so Steve could show us how he plays with things, his desire to stack things, really creatively changing the relationship of objects, playing and exploring. To make this musical we drew notes and chords on the table, and I played simultaneously to represent his choices on a keyboard: a great, quick method for a hackathon.  We tried to work out different interfaces which represented harmonic journeys, like the cycle of fifths. We discovered not having to roll over other notes or chords was important so we tried putting chord names in a circle but that rendered a lot of wasted space. We all loved the stacking but couldn't work out how the motion capture Ayako had prepared could read it. We played with ident tags but the system needed to be memorable and comprehensible for Steve.  Eventually we returned to making a large keyboard layout one using copper tape circuits for each note, connected to a midi keyboard and arpeggiator in Ableton. We gave him 3 flat weighted objects covered with copper which triggered and held their pitch when placed on the notes. By moving 1 object at a time he had total control of his harmonic journey. We also added buttons to transpose entire chords up and down. His final performance was an amazing demonstration of the freedom he'd suddenly gained to compose his own chords.